source 2: in 1500, 458 million of people lived on earth 1: european populations among the earth...

Chapter 1: European populations among the Earth Settlement

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First exercise: map analysis: Sources to use: Map entitled at the beginning of our era, 250 million of people lived on Earth (Based on J.-P. Bardet, History of human settlement, Paris, 1998), Map entitled in 1500, 458 million of people lived on Earth (Based on J.-P. Bardet, History of human settlement, Paris, 1998), Map entitled in 1750, 720 million of people lived on Earth (Based on J.-P. Bardet, History of human settlement, Paris, 1998) and map entitled in 1914, 1,825 millions of people lived on Earth (Based on J.-P. Bardet, History of human settlement, Paris, 1998). Source 1: At the beginning of our era, 250 million of people lived on Earth

Source: Based on J.-P. Bardet, History of human settlement, Paris, 1998.

Source 2: In 1500, 458 million of people lived on Earth



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Source 3: In 1750, 720 million of people lived on Earth:


Source 4: In 1914, 1,825 millions of people lived on Earth



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Questions: 1. What kind of sources is represented above? Are there primary1 or secondary2 sources? 2. Look at the key of the maps and explain what information the maps bring you. 3. Identify the author and the audience of the maps. 4. What is the context3 of each map? 5. For each map, prove that Europe is one of the most important areas of settlement in the

world? 6. For each map, prove that the place of Europe as an area of settlement, even if it was

important, was always beyond other area of settlement. 7. Was the world population equally dispatched in the world through history? 8. Using the answer to the previous questions, find one or two main questions we will

answer all along the chapter. I. The transformations of the European population Since the Antiquity, Europe has always been an important area of settlement in the world. Since then, European populations has grown up using the progress of agriculture to feed more and more people. But, this general image isn’t so simple. Many times, there were large demographic growths but also important demographic decreases because of famine, wars, and so on.

A. Variation and transformations of the European population during the Modern Times.

1) The expansion of the European population during the 16th century Sources to use: The evolution of the European population from the 14th century to the 17th century (Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment, NYC, 2011, p. 84), Food abundance and wealth? (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the peasantry wedding banquet, 1568, Oil on wood, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna), Economy and demography in the 16th century (Skip Knox, European Modern period history, online essay, Boisse state university, 2008), Amsterdam, Plans of the city (Cornelis Anthonisz, Bird's eye view of Amsterdam,1544. Woodcut. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Atlas van Loon4, Map of Amsterdam, 1649). Source 1: The evolution of the European population from the 14th century to the 17th century: By 1300, there were few lands left to be occupied, and the European population had grown to 80 million, more than twice its size 300 years earlier. […] In the early years of the [14th century], a worsening climate brought colder and wetter conditions with […] crop failures, famine and disease. But the [most important] of human catastrophes struck in 1347 with a massive onslaught5 of plague6, an event we know today as the Black Death7. […] Fields and

1 A source made by someone who is contemporary with the facts. 2 A source made by someone who is not a contemporary with the facts and which are based on a reconstruction. 3 The context matches with what happens in a region during the period when the sources were made. 4 The Atlas Van Loon is the extremely sumptuous atlas commissioned by Frederik Willem van Loon from Amsterdam, bound in red morocco and kept in an especially made olive wood cabinet. The Atlas van Loon contains the Dutch edition of Joan Blaeu's Grooten Atlas in nine volumes from 1663-1665, both town books of the Northern and Southern Netherlands from 1649, the Italian town books of Rome, the Vatican State and Naples and Sicily, all from 1663. The atlas also contains two volumes of the French edition of the Grooten Atlas, covering France and Switzerland, from 1663. 5 A strong or violent attack. 6 La peste. 7 La Peste Noire.


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villages were abandoned in many parts of Europe. The decline reached its low point somewhere around the middle of the 15th century, and recovery was slow. By 1500, European population stood scarcely8 higher than it had 200 years earlier. The gradual recovery that began at the end of the 15th century continued fitfully9 for several centuries. […] The gain of population […] has been confined to two periods: the early 16th century and the middle to later parts of the 18th century.

Source: Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment, NYC, 2011, p. 84.

Source 2: Food abundance and wealth?

Source: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the peasantry wedding banquet, 1568, Oil on wood, 114 x 164 cm,

Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna.

Source 3: Economy and demography in the 16th century: One of the most fundamental variables in any economic system is population growth. The most important event in the late Middle Ages was the demographic crisis of the 14th century. […] Only from around 1470 did Europe's population really recover the ground it had lost. What followed was growth that lasted into the middle of the 17th century, though the strongest period was in the first three quarters of the 16th. Growing population fueled a growing economy […] However, population alone isn't enough to account for either the growth or the decline; but it was certainly a major factor. […] Perhaps equally important are the complex movements within the general trend10; most especially, the general movement from the countryside to the city, and from small towns into very large cities. […]

Source : Skip Knox, European Modern period history, online essay, Boisse state university, 2008.

8 Only just 9 Not continuous or regular 10 a general direction in which a situation is changing or developing


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Source 4: Amsterdam, Plans of the city

Source: Cornelis Anthonisz11, Bird's eye view of Amsterdam,1544. Woodcut. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

11 also spelled Anthonissen or Teunissen (ca. 1505 – 1553), was a Dutch painter, engraver, and mapmaker.


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Source: Atlas van Loon12, Map of Amsterdam, 1649

Questions: 1. Present source 3 (present the two plans together as much as you can). 2. Make a detailed analysis of source 2. What can you say about peasantry in the Netherland

at that period. 3. Explain the demographic evolution of the European population from the 14th century to

the 17th century (source 1). 4. Find the reasons of the demographic growth during the 16th century (sources 2, 3 and 4).

2) An important demographic crisis in Europe in the 17th century Sources to use: The 17th century, a period of demographic crisis (Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment, NYC, 2011, p. 84), London Great Plague, 1665 (Rita Greer, The Great Plague, 1665), Testimonies from the Great Plague (Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator and Member of Parliament, Diairy, 1665).

12 The Atlas Van Loon is the extremely sumptuous atlas commissioned by Frederik Willem van Loon from Amsterdam, bound in red morocco and kept in an especially made olive wood cabinet. The Atlas van Loon contains the Dutch edition of Joan Blaeu's Grooten Atlas in nine volumes from 1663-1665, both town books of the Northern and Southern Netherlands from 1649, the Italian town books of Rome, the Vatican State and Naples and Sicily, all from 1663. The atlas also contains two volumes of the French edition of the Grooten Atlas, covering France and Switzerland, from 1663.


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Source 1: The 17th century, a period of demographic crisis: The founding of new worlds and the intellectual and cultural transformation brought to Europe at this time by the Renaissance and Reformation had done little to protect the population from the all too familiar ravages of famine, disease13 and warfare14. Disastrous crops failures and famine continued to be common throughout Europe to the end of the 18th century […]. They were numerous outbreaks15 of plague, particularly in cities, during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Great Plague of London in 1665 is said to have killed as many as 100,000 residents in just 18 months16. Outbreaks of smallpox17 and typhus also took a dreadful toll18. The period is also known for the terrible deprivations19 caused by warring armies. […] Population losses in Germany during the Thirty years’ War (1618-1648) are thought to have reduced the population of many areas by more than a half.

Source: Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment, NYC, 2011, p. 84

Source 2: London Great Plague, 1665.

Source: Rita Greer, The Great Plague, 1665.

Source 3: Testimonies from the Great Plague: 13 illness 14 the activity of fighting a war 15 the sudden start of something unpleasant, especially violence or a disease 16 The population of London at that time was about 460,000 inhabitants. 17 Variole 18 Prendre un lourd tribut. 19 destructions


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June 7th. This day I did see, in Drury Lane, two or three houses marked with a red cross upon their doors and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ[e] there, which was a sad sight20 to me." Plague was so common that this would have been a common sight in London with the person seeing it simply feeling sorry for the family inside the locked house. June 21st. I found all the21 town almost going out of town, the coaches and wagons being all full of people going into the country22." July. “The sad news of the death of so many in the parish23 of the plague, forty last night, the bell always going . . . either for deaths or burials.” August. “Survivors are fain24 to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.”

Source: Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator and Member of Parliament, Diary, 1665

Questions: 1. Describe source 2 and make a complete analysis of the painting in order to explain the

situation of London during the Great Plague. 2. How did people try to protect themselves from the Plague. 3. Is the Great Plague of 1665 responsible of many death in London (justify)? 4. Using the first source, explain if the Plague was the only reason of the demographic

decrease in the 17th century? If not, explain which the other reasons were.

B. Demographic transition during the 18th and 19th centuries: the British case. Sources to use: Source 1: Demographic Transition, a change of European Behavior: In 1780 Europe’s population stood at 160 million, just twice what it had been at the beginning of the 14th century. During the next 160 years it more than tripled, to reach 515 million on the eve of WWII. The significant changes that occurred in the demographic behavior of most European populations during a period of less than 150 years is what we know as the demographic transition.


Source 2: Schemes of the Demographic Transition:

20 the act of seeing somebody/something 21 Today, the formula will be the entire town. 22 Country here means countryside. 23 paroisse 24 Obligated.


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Source: Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment,

NYC, 2011, p. 90

Source: The UK and demographic transition from the article Economy and demographic transition in the UK since 1700 written by Aubhik Khan25. Source 3: The reasons for demographic transitions.

25 Aubhik Khan is a senior economic advisor and economist in the Research Department of the Philadelphia Fed.


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The early lowering of the death rate was clearly the result of a considerable reduction in crisis mortality, that is, in deaths from infectious diseases that occurred during epidemics. The explanation for such a reduction may be sought26 in three areas:

- spontaneous decline in the virulence of major diseases - advances in medical knowledge and technology - improvements in the living environment.

As for the first, […] there is no evidence that any of the endemic diseases27 underwent28 significant alteration. As for medical technology, no advances sufficient to substantially reduce death from disease were made until the 1930s. […] The one exception is to this generalization is the development of smallpox29 vaccination. […] By itself, however, event his medical advance could not achieve30 a substantial decline in overall death rates. It would seem that improvements31 in the living environment provide the only explanation for the early decline in death rates during the European Epidemiologic Transition.


Source 4: Food supply improvement allowed people to die less: […] Substantial advances in agriculture were achieved during the Agricultural Revolution, which began in England in the 17th century. They included new crops bred32 from older ones, such as the turnip33 and clover34, which not only helped to improve soils […] but also provided35 winter fodder36 for animals. […] There were also the New World crops, such as maize and the potato, […] and the tomato […]. The building of canal systems in the 18th century, the improvement of roads and later the introduction of the railroads provided the mean to transport food over significant distances. […] One of the great results of the Industrial revolution was certainly a major improvement in personal hygiene, lowering the incidence of disease and he frequency of death from it. […] The installation of public drainage system in cities assured the separation of human waste material from drinking water.

Source: Robert C. Ostergren,Mathias Le Bossé, Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment, NYC, 2011, p. 92

Source 5: Agricultural revolution in the United Kingdom: Despite these criticisms, it is still argued that an English agricultural revolution happened in the century or so after 1750. One obvious reason behind the argument is the fact that an expanding population from this time on was largely fed by home production. In 1750 English population stood at about 5.7 million. […] Contrary to expectation, however, population grew to unprecedented levels after 1750, reaching 16.6 million in 1850, and agricultural output expanded with it. One reason output grew was through new farming systems involving the rotation of turnips and clover, although these were part of the general intensification of agricultural production, with more food being produced from the same area of land. Intensity was also increased by land reclamation […].

26 In this case, divided into, separated into, organised into, … 27 Disease regularly found in a particular place or among a particular group of people and difficult to get rid of (= se débarasser). 28 To undergo: to experience something, especially a change or something unpleasant. 29 Variole 30 To succeed to reach a goal. 31 Améliorations 32 To breed : faire de l’élevage ou modifier des plantes en les assemblant à d’autres. 33 Navet 34 Trèfle 35 Apporter 36 Food for horses and farm animals.


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Other examples include the clearing of woodland and the reclamation of upland pastures. This extent of this activity is impossible to quantify, but may have affected some 30 per cent of the agricultural area of England, from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries. […]

Source: BBC History website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/agricultural_revolution_01.shtml

Source 6: Medical improvements, the last factor and the weakest: […] Medecine played by far the lastest role. It is important to keep in mind that until the late 19th century there was no understanding of germs and their role in causing disease. It was during the last two decades37 of the 19th century that medical researchers learned how germs were reproduced and transmitted and which ones caused which diseases. Antiseptic surgery, anesthetics, the use of masks, and scrubbing38 did not begin until the 1880s. Before that, major surgery was attempted only at a last resort and most often resulted in death. Even after the relationships between germs and infectious diseases were understood, it was not until the 1930s that any really effective39 means of killing infectious microorganisms were developed.


Questions: 1. Explain the phenomenon of demographic transition using source 3. Did the Demographic

Transition in the UK fit the general model? 2. Find the main reason explaining the demographic transition in the UK? 3. Find another reason explaining the decrease of death rate? 4. Explain if medicine is important in demographic transition at that time? II. The European participated to the world settlement

A. The European at the origin of Black settlement in America and the Caribbean basin

Sources to use: Slave trade towards history: The history of the “Middle passage” (Liverpool international slavery museum), Slaves from Africa, terror, torture and death (Liverpool international slavery museum), Destination of the Atlantic slave trade (1451-1870) (Adapted from Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade,University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), African Diaspora (Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds., Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, New York, 1998), Triangular trade, a well organised economic system (British National Archives) Onboard – Olaudah Equiano (Liverpool international slavery museum), Plan of the British Slave Ship "Brookes," 1789 (Broadside collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress). Olaudah Equiano, arrival in the Americas (Liverpool international slavery museum). Source 1: Slave trade towards history: The history of the “Middle passage”40: Channels of wealth flowing from the New World to the Old were based largely on the cultivation of crops like sugar, tobacco, and coffee. These crops figured importantly in European rituals of conspicuous consumption. Profits for a plantation owner depended on the number of labourers he controlled. The key to wealth for plantation owners was employing

37 Décennies. 38 To clean something by rubbing it hard, perhaps with a brush and usually with soap and water. 39 Efficace. 40 The term 'Middle Passage' is often used to describe the period that enslaved Africans endured in the holds of slave ships as they crossed the Atlantic. The term, however, is derived from the European perspective of the triangular trade route journey. It does not represent the view that for millions of enslaved Africans crossing the Atlantic was neither the middle, nor the end of the journey to their new lives as chattel in the Americas.


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many labourers, while keeping costs low. Free European labourers demanded high wages. In the long run, the cost of slaves was lower. Initially Europeans tried enslaving Native Americans. But Native peoples lacked genetic immunities to Old-World diseases like smallpox and malaria and suffered catastrophic mortality - over 90% of the native population of the Americas perished from Old-World diseases after contact. Africans, on the other hand, possessed the required immunities. Europeans discovered this by the early 1500s and the Atlantic slave trade developed rapidly to fill the demand. In the notorious triangular trade, ships departed from Bristol, Liverpool and other ports in England carrying trade goods, such as beads, cloth and guns, to West Africa, where they exchanged their goods for enslaved Africans who were then transported to the Caribbean, South America, and American colonies to work on the plantations. The vessels returned home with sugar, tobacco and cotton, the produce of the enslaved workforce. Before 1820, over 80% of the people arriving in the New World were enslaved Africans. It is estimated that 12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas.

Source: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/archaeology/background/index.aspx, 2013. Source 2: Slaves from Africa, terror, torture and death: […] That slavery existed in Africa prior to the late 15th century is a matter of fact, but European involvement would lead to what the historian Robin Blackburn has termed a 'degradation of slavery'. The increase in African involvement in the trade from the 16th century onwards was caused by an influx of outside capital, the pre-existing trade being spurred on by the growing demand for Europe's goods: fabrics and utensils, guns and alcohol. A free-for-all among African traders to capture their neighbours and rivals for sale to Europeans was deliberately stimulated by European traders anchored offshore or in coastal stations with their wares. Following their capture, the captives would be marched to the coast. […] Writing on behalf of the Africa Association, a British explorers' organisation, Mungo Park41 reported that a typical column of slaves would spend eight hours a day on the road, covering about 20 miles. They were joined in pairs at the leg and a chain would attach them, one to another, at the neck. Park accompanied one such caravan from the banks of the Niger to the River Gambia and was touched by the sufferings of those 'doomed ... to a life of captivity in a foreign land'. The ultimate destination of the enslaved would often be one of the European forts on the coast, such as Elmina, Bunce Island or the island of Gorée. For most of the captives, the moment of greatest terror was when they found themselves crowded together in the canoes that were to transport them to the ships lying at anchor on the open seas. One slave-ship captain, Thomas Phillips, left this account: “When our slaves were come to the seaside, our canoes were ready to carry them off to the longboat if the sea permitted, and she conveyed them aboard ship, where the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The negroes are so wilful and loathe to leave their own country that they have often leapt out of canoes, boats and ships into the sea, and kept underwater till they drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved ... they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we of hell ...” The average slaving voyage from the West African coast to the Caribbean or the Americas took six to eight weeks. The new terrors experienced by the enslaved people and the inhuman discipline that accompanied this – ships' crews, outnumbered 10 to 1 by their captives, resorted to the use of iron muzzles and whips to exert control – would be a foretaste of the misery that awaited the Africans on the other side of the Atlantic.

41 British explorer that reported in the 1790s the condition of slaves from their native land to the slaves markets on the coast.


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Source: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/archaeology/background/index.aspx Source 3: European involvement in the « Middle Passage » a. Destination of the Atlantic slave trade (1451-1870)

Source: Adapted from Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).


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b. African Diaspora

Source: Paul Finkelman and Joseph Miller, eds., Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (New York, 1998), vol. 1, p. xlvii. (Reproduction courtesy of Macmillan Reference USA, an Imprint of the Gale Group, a Thomson

Learning Company)


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c. Triangular trade, a well organised economic system.

Source: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/, 2013.

Source 4: Onboard – Olaudah Equiano42: "The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment which was soon converted to terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me. Their complexion too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and on

42 Equiano was an African writer whose experiences as a slave prompted him to become involved in the British abolition movement. In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano writes that he was born in the Eboe province, in the area that is now southern Nigeria. He describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of 11, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia. In the absence of written records it is not certain whether Equiano's description of his early life is accurate. Doubt also stems from the fact that, in later life, he twice listed a birthplace in the Americas. Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, everything Equiano describes in his extraordinary autobiography can be verified. (Biography taken from bbc hitory website).


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my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water: and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself. In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men, I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and loose hair. They told me I was not. But still I feared I should be put to death, the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty; and this not only shown towards us blacks, but also to some of the white themselves. One white man in particular I saw flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any length of time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness amongst the slaves, of which many died. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable."

Source: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/middle_passage/olaudah_equiano.aspx (1760s)


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Source 5: Plan of the British Slave Ship "Brookes," 178943

Source: Broadside collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (Portfolio 282-

43 [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-44000]; also, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library).

43 "Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788"; shows each deck and cross-sections of decks and "tight packing" of captives. One of the most famous images of the transatlantic slave trade. After the 1788 Regulation Act, the Brookes (also spelled Brooks) was allowed to carry 454 slaves, the approximate number shown in this illustration. However, in four earlier voyages (1781-86), she carried from 609 to 740 slaves so crowding was much worse than shown here; for example, in her 1782 voyage with 609 enslaved Africans, there were 351 men, 127 women, 90 boys, and 41 girls crammed into its decks.


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Source 6: A testimony from an slave on the arrival in the Americas: Olaudah Equiano - arrival in the Americas Abolition campaigner and former slave Olaudah Equiano wrote his autobiography in 1789. In this extract he describes his experiences on arrival in the Americas. "At last we came in sight of the island of Barbados, at which the whites on board gave a great shout, and made many signs of joy to us. We did not know what to think of this; but as the vessel drew nearer we plainly saw the harbour and other ships of different kinds and sizes; and we soon anchored amongst them off Bridge Town. Many merchants and planters now came on board. They put us in separate parcels and examined us attentively. They also made us jump, and pointed to the land, signifying we had to go there. We were conducted immediately to the merchant's yard, where we were pent up altogether like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age. We were not many days in the merchant's custody before we were sold after their usual manner, which is this: on a signal given, the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined and make a choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended and the eagerness in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans who may well be supposed to consider them as the ministers of that destruction to which they think themselves devoted. In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. It was very common in several of the islands, particularly in St Kitts, for the slaves to be branded with the initial letters of their masters name; and a load of heavy iron hooks hung about their necks. Indeed on the most trifling occasion they were loaded with chains and often instruments of torture were added. The iron muzzle, thumb screws etc. are so well known as not to need a description and were sometimes applied for the slightest fault. I have seen a Negro beaten till some of his bones were broken, for even letting the pot boil over. Is it surprising that usage like this should drive the poor creatures to despair and make them seek a refuge in death from those evils that render their lives intolerable? This they frequently do. A Negro man on board a vessel of my master, having been put in irons for some trifling misdemeanour, and kept in that state for some days, being weary of life took an opportunity of jumping overboard into the sea; however he was picked up without being drowned. Another whose life was also a burden to him resolved to starve himself to death and refused to eat any victuals. This procured him a severe flogging and he also on the first occasion which offered jumped overboard but he was saved."

Source: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/americas/olaudah_arrival.aspx (1760s)

Questions: 1. Using the maps, explain the main trajectory of slave trade during the period of the Atlantic

Trade. Is the European slave trade the only one? 2. Did the European the only one at the origin of enslavement in Africa? Contextualize the

European slave trade. 3. Describe the condition of living, transport and sale of the African slaves? 4. Describe the European point of view among slaves. 5. Prove that the European slave trade deeply transformed the demographic aspect of Africa.

B. The Irish, from the terrible situation in Ireland t o the US cities and countryside. 1) The Irish left awful conditions in Ireland:

Sources to use: Catastrophic consequences of the Act of Union for Ireland (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 16), Lands and Irish condition in the hands of the


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landlords (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 23), Irish Catholics discriminated and persecuted (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 27), The Irish demographic conditions in the 19th century (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 30-31 The Potato famine Jim Donelly, British historian, The Irish famine, bbc.co.uk, 2012), The aftermaths of the Great Hunger (The impact and legacy of the Great Irish Famine, lecture delivered by Mr. Éamon Ó Cuív, TD, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Canada, on Friday May 8th 2009). Source 1: Catastrophic consequences of the Act of Union for Ireland: […] The Union [implemented on January 1st 1801] was bitterly opposed; contemporaries described it not as a marriage but as a “brutal rape”. […] As the years passed, however, no happiness resulted. The hope of English investment proved a delusion44. Free trade between the two countries enabled England to use Ireland as a market for surplus English goods; Irish Industry collapsed, unemployment was widespread, and Dublin, now that an Irish Parliament sat no longer in College Green, became a half-dead city. Above all, Catholic emancipation, expected to follow immediately on the Union, was only achieved, after a desperate struggle, in 1829.

Source: Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 16.

Source 2: Lands and Irish condition in the hands of the landlords: During the 18th century a new method of dealing with Irish property was adopted. Large tracts of land were let at a fixed rent to a single individual […] and he sub-let as he chose. This “middleman system” produced misery: the landlord rid himself45 of responsibility and assured himself of a regular income, but the tenants46 were handed over to exploitation. Profit was the only motive and contemporary observers denounce middlemen as “land sharks”, “bloodsuckers”, “the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country”. Moreover, the middlemen degraded the land because […] the split farms into smaller and smaller holdings for the sake of increased rents. […] Yet the terms on which the Irish peasant occupied his land was harsh, and two provisions in particular […] deprived him of incentive47 and security. First, any improvements he made to his holding48 became, when the lease49 expired or was terminated, the property of the landlord, without compensation. Second, he very seldom50 had any security of tenure; the majority of tenants in Ireland were tenants “at will”, that is, the will of the landlord, who could turn them out whenever he chose. […].

Source: Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 23.

Source 3: Irish Catholics discriminated and persecuted [At the end of the 17th century, the English] barred51 Catholics from the army and the navy, the law, commerce, and from every civic activity. No Catholic could vote, hold any office under the Crown, or purchase land, and Catholic estates52 were dismembered by an enactment53 directing that at the death of the catholic owner, the land was to be divided

44 A false belief or opinion about yourself or your situation. 45 Most of the landlords living in England never came in their entire life in Ireland to see their properties. 46 Person who pays rent for the use of a room, building, land, etc. to the person who owns it. 47 Motivation. 48 A piece of land that is rented by somebody and used for farming 49 Bail. 50 Not often. 51 To ban or prevent somebody from doing something. 52 A large area of land, usually in the country, that is owned by one person or family 53 = law


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among all his sons, unless the eldest became a Protestant, when he would inherit the whole. Education was almost impossible, since Catholics might not attend schools, nor keep schools, nor send their children to be educated abroad. The Practice of the Catholic Faith was proscribed54; informing was encouraged as an “honourable service” and priest hunting treated as a sport. Such were the main provisions of the Penal Code, described by Edmund Burke55 as “a machine well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself”. […]

Source: Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 27 Source 4: The Irish demographic conditions in the 19th century: […] It is agreed by all authorities that about the year 1780 the population of Ireland began to take an extraordinary upward leap56. The increase between 1779 and 1841 has been placed at the almost incredible figure of 172 per cent. During the same period a rapid increase also took place in the population of England and Wales. It is customary to ascribe this to the spread of industrialization, resulting in improved communications and more towns with better opportunities for social intercourse and early marriage, to a more general adoption of vaccination, with a consequent reduction of deaths […]. But this cannot apply to Ireland. […] Still, certain circumstances favourable to population increase were present in Ireland during that period. First, and most important, there was an abundant supply of incredibly cheap food, easily obtained in the potato. […] Next, far from acting as a deterrent57, the miserably low standard of Irish life encouraged young couples to marry early. […] The Irish are fond of children, and family feeling is exceptionally strong. Moreover, in pre-famine Ireland, children were a necessity because it was insurance for a man and a woman not to be destitute from their lands in old age. […]

Source: Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, London, 1992, p. 30-31. Source 5: The Potato famine: […] The Great Famine in Ireland began as a natural catastrophe of extraordinary magnitude, but its effects were severely worsened by the actions and inactions of the Whig government, headed by Lord John Russell in the crucial years from 1846 to 1852. Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). […] This was not an artificial famine as the traditional Irish nationalist interpretation has long maintained - not at any rate at the start. The original gross deficiency of food was real. In 1846 and successive years blight58 destroyed the crop that had previously provided approximately 60 per cent of the nation's food needs. […] There existed - after 1847, at least - an absolute sufficiency of food that could have prevented mass starvation, if it had been properly distributed so as to reach the smallholders and labourers of the west and the south of Ireland. Why, then, was it not better able to deal with the problems caused by the failure of its potato crop? In answering this question, […] we should review what the British government might have done to mitigate the natural catastrophe arising from repeated ravages of potato blight.

54 Forbidden. 55 English observer for a parlimantary commission on Ireland in the beginning of the 19th century. 56 To increase suddenly and by a large amount. 57 A thing that makes somebody less likely to do something 58 any disease that kills plants, especially crops


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First, the government might have prohibited the export of grain from Ireland […]. Second, the government could have continued its so-called soup-kitchen scheme for a much longer time. Third, the wages that the government paid on its vast but short-lived public works in the winter of 1846-47 needed to be much higher […]. Fourth, the poor-law system of providing relief […] needed to be much less restrictive. Fifth, the government might have done something to restrain the ruthless mass eviction of families from their homes […]. Last, and above all, the British government should have been willing to treat the famine crisis in Ireland as an imperial responsibility and to bear the costs of relief after the summer of 1847. […] There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire59, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of 'moralism'60.

Source: Jim Donelly, British historian, The Irish famine, bbc.co.uk, 2012. Source 6: The aftermath of the Great Hunger: During the crisis years, it is estimated that over one million Irish perished, from hunger or, more commonly, from hunger-related diseases. In the decade following 1846 – when the floodgates of emigration opened to a population fleeing a stricken land – more than 1.8 million Irish emigrated, with more than half of these fleeing (more as refugees than as emigrants, as the historian Peter Gray has remarked) during the famine years of 1846-50. The population of Ireland, which was close to 8.5 million in 1845, had fallen to 6.6 million by 1851. It would continue to fall – due to the relentless drain of emigration – for many decades to come. Source: The impact and legacy of the Great Irish Famine, lecture delivered by Mr. Éamon Ó Cuív, TD, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Canada, on Friday

May 8th 2009. Questions: 1. Explain the situation of landuse in Ireland at the moment of the famine. 2. Explain the demographic situation in Ireland at the moment of the famine. 3. Explain the political and economic situation for the Irish at the moment of the famine. 4. Was it possible to avoid the Great famine? To justify your answer, give five actions the

English government should have been made and three ideological reasons explaining why he didn’t do it.

5. Which were the aftermaths of the Great Irish famine in Ireland?

2) The difficult acceptation of the Irish in the USA: Sources to use: film sequences from Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, 2002, Irish in the USA in 1880 (Scribner's statistical atlas of the United States, - Plate 26: Population (German, Irish), 1880, Library of Congress), Anti Irish feelings from the Nativists (US

59 Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine. The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning. 60 There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine. The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning.


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history.org, 2013), The Patriot, a newspaper edited by the Know Nothing Party (American patriot newspaper FrontPage, 1850s-1860s). Source 1: Gangs of New York (sequences and synopses) Gangs of New York is a 2002 American fictional historical drama set in the mid-19th century in the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan. The film was directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan, inspired by Herbert Asbury's 1928 non-fiction book, The Gangs of New York. It was made in Cinecittà, Rome, distributed by Miramax Films and nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film begins in 1846 but quickly jumps to 1862. The two principal issues of the era in New York were Irish immigration to the city and the Federal government's execution of the ongoing Civil War. The story follows Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) in his roles as crime boss and political kingmaker under the helm of "Boss" Tweed (Jim Broadbent). The film culminates in a violent confrontation between Cutting and his mob with the protagonist Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his allies, which coincides with the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Source 2: Irish in the USA in 1880

Source: Scribner's statistical atlas of the United States, - Plate 26: Population (German, Irish), 1880, Library of

Congress. Source 3: Anti Irish feelings from the Nativists: With the vast numbers of German and Irish coming to America, hostility to them erupted. Part of the reason for the opposition was religious. All of the Irish and many of the Germans were Roman Catholic. Part of the opposition was political. Most immigrants living in cities became Democrats because the party focused on the needs of commoners. Part of the opposition occurred because Americans in low-paying jobs were threatened and sometimes replaced by


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groups willing to work for almost nothing in order to survive. Signs that read NINA — "No Irish Need Apply" — sprang up throughout the country. Ethnic and anti-Catholic rioting occurred in many northern cites, the largest occurring in Philadelphia in 1844 during a period of economic depression. Protestants, Catholics and local militia fought in the streets. 16 were killed, dozens were injured and over 40 buildings were demolished. "Nativist" political parties sprang up almost overnight. The most influential of these parties, the Know Nothings, was anti-Catholic and wanted to extend the amount of time it took immigrants to become citizens and voters. They also wanted to prevent foreign-born people from ever holding public office. Economic recovery after the 1844 depression reduced the number of serious confrontations for a time, as the country seemed to be able to use all the labor it could get.

Source: US history.org, 2013. Source 4: The Patriot, a newspaper edited by the Know Nothing Party:

Source: American patriot newspaper FrontPage, 1850s-1860s.

Questions: 1. Show where the Irish were the most numerous in the USA. 2. Using the example of NYC, explain how the Irish life was in most of the cities in the

USA? 3. Explain if the integration of Irish was easy in the cities of the USA. Quote some

arguments of the opponents to the Irish immigration. 4. Politically and civically speaking, explain how the Irish migrants were treated in the USA

during the late 19th century?

source 2: in 1500, 458 million of people lived on earth 1: european populations among the earth...

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