Britain and the Trade

[Christel]

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/path ... _trade.htm

Guns for Slaves

The slave trade had a major impact on Britain's economy. Ships loaded with goods left Britain for the West African coast. There, commodities were bartered for all manner of tropical products, including humans. Military supplies were regularly shipped to forts in West Africa. Royal African Company schedules reveal a methodical record-keeping system for exchanging brass rods, cutlery and guns manufactured in Birmingham. The historian F. W. Hackwood argues that the West African slave trade was the chief supporter of the gun industry in Wednesbury and Darlaston, and gunsmiths in the Midlands produced most of the 150,000 guns which British ships exchanged annually for Africans.

[froggy]

The Brits, the French, the Dutch produced not only guns, usually of mediocre quality (Fusils de traite) but all sort of battering products,
The Africans kept doing what they always did, ie : capturing their neighbours as slaves,
The Europans started to compete for those slaves with the Turks & the Arabs, who have the record for the bigest slave traders of all time,
The Irish started to make salted meat to feed the crews and cargo of slaves who had to be well fed so their would arrive in good condition to fetch a good price,
etc.. etc ...

It's all a far cry from the current revisionism portraying the nasty white man running after that poor black children and mistreating then during the voyage to the West Indies plantations ... but eeh cant let the truth coming in the way of a good story