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Georgia’s entry into the market for Africans came during the appalling height of the entire slave trade. In fierce rivalry with the French, Portuguese , and Dutch, the English had long since pushed their way to the forefront of that death-filled commerce and, by the 1730s, become the supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world. Between 1700 and 1775, its ships delivered more than 1.3 million slaves to the British West Indies and North America. The expansive markets of Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands absorbed the vast majority of the newly enslaved people as planters expanded their holdings and the British Caribbean acquired additional islands after the French defeat in 1763.The insatiable demand of the British public for sugar drove the trade while the growing markets for tobacco and rice in Europe added to the demand for Africans in North America. In the late seventeenth century, slavers began sailing to the mainland to supply tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland and, after 1700, to supply a rising number of rice planters in South Carolina. By the 1730s, Charles Town was importing as many as two to three thousand bondsmen and -women a year, and, although imports all but ceased during the next decade as the colony imposed a high tariff for a short time and rice prices fell during King George’s War, expansion of the trade resumed after mid-century. During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Charles Town imported sixty thousand Africans, the largest slave market in North America. During the early years, Georgia’s commitment to a plantation economy created barely a ripple in the markets of the Caribbean and North America. In the summer of 1750, a newly arrived catechist for Africans reported to his superiors in London that the colony contained “three hundred forty nine working Negroes, two hundred two men, and one hundred forty seven women, besides Children too Young for Labour.” To the remaining trustees , James Habersham drove home the point that few residents could afford to purchase slaves directly from Africa and would have to make their Chapter Six The Slave Trade in Creating a Black Georgia The Slave Trade in Creating a Black Georgia 113 acquisitions in Carolina “as their Circumstances will admit.” The massive adoption of black slavery, described by Jack Greene as the critical process by which white Georgians developed a positive sense of self, took form only during the last decade of the royal period, 1766–75, when the colony eclipsed Virginia and Maryland in terms of the imports of “New Negroes” and became the second largest market in North America. Over those ten years, as shown in Table 9, Georgia imported 5,349 people from Africa, 2,003 from the many ports in the Caribbean, 2,604 from the booming slave entrepôt of Charles Town, and 500 others from the intercoastal trade. While Charles Town imported 30,100 enslaved people in that ten-year period from Africa and the Caribbean, Georgia brought in a total of 9,956: 7,352 from Africa and the West Indies and 2,604 from the Charles Town market,a total of almost one-third of its neighbor. In light of this dramatic development, questions abound. How far was the Savannah slave market a faithful copy of Charles Town’s and how did it differ? To what extent were Savannah’s slave factors able to set the agenda for that booming trade as rice exports increased, or was the Georgia market a creature of British slavers and developments in Africa and the Caribbean? In short, what can we learn from this frontier outpost of the components of supply and demand for black slaves in transatlantic markets? During the eighteenth century, the driving force behind the British transatlantic slave trade was the enormous wealth created by the sugar revolution in the Caribbean, the most valuable part of the empire. By the 1770s, Jamaica had replaced Barbados as the economic powerhouse of the region and become the greatest market for slaves in British America. During the third quarter of the century, Jamaica was the destination of 37 percent of all slave ships sent to British America and 44 percent of all slave vessels dispatched to the British West Indies. It received 258,000 Africans while,for the British West Indies as a whole,Jamaica included,slave vessels brought 548,000. In contrast, Charles Town was the largest slave trading area in British North America during the eighteenth...

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