THE HAND OF THE GIANT 245 



zil, acted as middlemen in the sugar trade and in marketing 

 slaves which the plantation economy demanded. 



So Charles II of England chartered the Royal African Com- 

 pany to take the slave trade away from the Dutch, and also 

 inaugurated restrictive navigation acts with all the English col- 

 onies to damage further the free commerce at which the Dutch 

 were such masters. This led to eventual troubles with the colo- 

 nies of the North American continent, and brought in such a 

 flux of African slave labor to the Caribbean that from the 

 middle 1600's on the white population of the islands began to 

 dwindle. Sugar created a temporary prosperity at the cost of 

 increased slave trade, impoverishment of the soil, and heavy- 

 handed absentee controls that bred increasing trouble with the 

 Atlantic seaboard colonies to the north. The Caribbean sugar 

 economy brought in the Yankee traders and created commer- 

 cial rivalries with England that came to final settlement in 

 the Revolution, which in turn set off the slave revolts in Haiti 

 and elsewhere. 



Who were the people strange to the American continent 

 that were forced against their will to populate the West In- 

 dies? They came in misery and chains down the long easy 

 reaches of the equatorial roots of the Ocean River. Did the 

 white men of the north who bought and paid for their inex- 

 haustible labor make them slaves? Did John Hawkins think 

 up the slave trade to enrich himself and his countrymen? 

 Nothing so temporary as that. The institution of slavery had 

 developed from the time of earliest history in the Mediter- 

 ranean world. It developed around human beings as the spoils 

 of war. The western slavers translated this into transactions in 

 merchandise, but all they had to do in order to do business 

 was to placate the coastal rulers and local African kings, for 

 the slave trade was thriving in Africa before the first black man 

 was ever transported west, and the rulers of this trade were the 

 Africans themselves. 



