>In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip

They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment.

It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.

Your comment reminded me of the famous J.M.W. Turner painting[1] which depicts the throwing overboard of hundreds of slaves so the captain of the ship could collect insurance payments.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship

Meanwhile let's remember that there are an estimated 45 million slaves today according to the World Economic Forum 2017.

It’s worth reading up on what’s gone on in Doha in the lead up to the World Cup. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/sport/f...

Yeah, but those slaves are not the same sort of slave this article is about.

This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.

> It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.

Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one.

Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.

>Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.

How can you know that? Do you have book references or something?

The link gives me this impression. The death rate alone suggests this.

The practice of killing slaves and claiming the insurance payout was eventually banned, but is exactly what you say didn’t happen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship

Those are incidents, and still show that the slave traders are acting in their own self-interest. It is not realistic to think that insurance companies would stand for this if it was standing practice.

> worst genocide in human history

Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit.

The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period.

From Wikipedia:

> Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1]

Over 300 years.

Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years.

Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4]

Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Ugh. It just struck me how the tragedy of the commons could apply to a human population.

I don't read that in their comment? They said genocide has a specific definition, and the Atlantic slave trade does not match it. You are free to disagree on that point. I personally don't think it's a very good point to make here.

Instead you made some argument that they are trying to argue that it wasn't that bad, which is not based on a literal interpretation of their comment.

Can you believe white supremacists use the same kind of thinking? They also toss around the word genocide where it does not apply, assuming one against whites. If you were to say what the commenter said, they'd do the same: Instead of engaging the arguments based on merit, they'd accuse you of wrongthink.

Better to let people be honest and judge argument's on their merit rather than start accusing people of wrongthink so easily. Perhaps this is a pretty big problem in the politics right now.

If it becomes impossible to correct the definition of words without being branded as a wrongthinker, then what good is that going to do?

Words have meanings, terms have definitions. I'm with the pedants more and more. Otherwise people can simply say awful things and claim not to have meant it that way. That how lying becomes a bit ok.

Today I learned that calling something evil -- but not the worst -- is minimization.

It's not, and the parent reply was uncharitable, yet I can understand why someone would feel revulsion at your post. It feels a bit like a parlor game with numbers. Not technically wrong, let's say—but so incongruent with what it's talking about as to leave one feeling chilled and dehumanized. In that way it does come across as minimizing.

but dang you can't put 'feeling chilled' and 'dehumanization' into rational numbers, and for a certain kind of person the inability to enumerate something or quantify its cost, is an automatic 'irrationality discount.' i.e. 'What can't be counted, can't count for much.'

Maybe that's part of why collating slavery vs. war goes wrong. Mixing even a little quality with all that quantity would change the mentality, it seems to me.

It's not. Plenty of people read what you wrote and understood it for how you meant it and also understood that the person who responded to you wildly distorted your point. You're not going to find a good conversation there. Its very sad that this type of distortion happens so often, but we live in a world where some people don't appreciate subtle truths.

genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

genocide - systematic killing of a racial or cultural group

Kidnapping a single ethnic group from their homeland and accepting that some percentage of them will die while transporting them in cages sure sounds like genocide.

The majority of Africans sold in slave trade were acquired and sold by other Africans, not kidnapped by people from Europe or the Middle East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

If we want to call it genocide, it would be more likely genocide of one African tribe towards another.

Note that this isn't to paint a picture of "look at these African savages killing each other", but only to highlight that historically members of the same ethnicity (at least the modern definition of "ethnicity") are rather eager to kill each other over resources (and moral differences to cover it up). Europeans, Asians, indigenous Americans etc were all quite successful in constant tribal warfare at various degrees of scale, there was nothing special about Africa here. In fact you could say that the Soviets were the most successful people in the history of the world at exterminating their own kind for one reason or another.

One Native American tribe killing another Native American tribe is still genocide. Africa is a continent, the slave trade was focused on nations / tribes within the continent. I think the appropriate application of ethnic group is applying it to the tribes / nations within the continent of Africa. Not the entire continent, which is made up of hundreds of ethnicities.

I would recommend James Michener's Chesapeake for a graphic account of how the slaves were treated right from the time they were shackled in chains in Africa and made to march hundreds of miles, dying along the way, dying on the voyage, and the lives -if you can call it that - they lived as slaves once they reached America. Although this is a work of fiction, it does a good job of portraying the horror.

I still wonder how anyone can do that to other human beings for three weeks. Even if you don't view them as the same status, they can clearly speak and think and come from societies with tools, clothing, art and shelter. Were the slave traders all sociopaths?

I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.

Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with.

This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.

I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.

>This last century ... example of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter.

well, just off the top of the head - today we have Yemen, Rahingya, Syria - the places where large number of innocent people/civilians suffer and die as direct result of other, reasonably normal, people just doing their job of inflicting that suffering and death in the name of the cause that is presented as a pretty good cause in all these cases - fighting terrorism.

Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature” is a masterwork on the subject. It’s also a terrific read and will change your view of history and make you happy to be alive in the present!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...

I've been meaning to read it, however the criticism from historians about it has made me somewhat uncomfortable about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Is there anything conclusive about how cherry-picked the numbers in the book are?

> Were the slave traders all sociopaths?

No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?

While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is that it's quite easy for a perfectly normal person to convince themselves that bad things that happen to a group of people of radically different physical appearance, culture, language and religion don't really count. When their society already has a cultural consensus to that effect, and when their job depends on it, it's ridiculously easy. The two universal and constant features of human nature are stupidity and evil. Radical evil is more or less always here now, but people always and everywhere choose to believe that it is only in the past or in the village over the next hill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240

Racism makes tyranny easier. Yes. But it is not necessary for tyranny.

If you ever find yourself in need, or on the wrong side of injustice, especially perpetrated be a greater authority, you will quickly realize how terrible really a lot of people out there are.

I agree: that is precisely my argument. It takes fairly little to turn people against you; and the African slaves sadly had a great deal going against them.

Consider how the men who toiled on the ships of that era lived: https://www.newworldexploration.com/explorers-tales-blog/lif...

Those who have power will always subjugate those who don't.

I'm not defending it, not at all. But mankind has been beating on his fellow man since the dawn of time. We truly are a horrific species.

Most evil is done by ordinary people, who have great capacity for it. It is a critical error, I think, to suppose that evil is done by the 'bad guys' and that I and my group, whoever that is, are somehow invulnerable to it. Instead, we must realize there is nothing different or special about us, and be ever on guard for its symptoms and the things that lead to it (IMHO, ideology and intolerance, and anything that puts my power and my desires above those of others').

Germany was arguably the cultural and scientific heart of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis murdered 11 million people. That isn't done by a few evil people; it requires the labors and cooperation of large numbers, and the passive acceptance of millions more.

I think you'll find that plenty of people are willing to not think so hard about such problems as long as it's in the course of a legal business. I'm sure it was also easy to find justification from commentators at the time when slavery was legal. You could just go about your slavery business and point at some guy's essay as to why you shouldn't feel guilty at all.

The popular opinion is that it was all evil white devils. The historical answer is that African tribes and kingdoms had been trading slaves for thousands of years. It was a nice source of income for them. When England abolished slavery there was a lot of resentment among the African elite.

I'd ask you to think about pretty much any of the recent wars that have happened... Innocent people died, sometimes in extreme pain, in each of them.

I think that covers just about every war in history

One has to eat food to create feces, especially food with fiber in it. If you’re starved nothing comes out because nothing is going in. I doubt the unfortunate human ‘cargo’ were fed very much or even at all.

I’m not sure why you were downvoted, but it is true and certainly would have factored into the situation.