markellion's video: Please watch how the slave trade really happened part 1

Bellow is from John Newton (ex slave trader and guy who wrote amazing grace) read 227-252 "Thoughts on the slave trade" http://books.google.com/books?id=OjI3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA245 "I verily believe, that the far greater part of the wars, in Africa, would cease, if the Europeans would cease to tempt them, by offering goods for slaves" Sorry I couldn't fit the whole thing on the descriptions box. This is for those who can't download the article the video shows pages 19-25 Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections of the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey 19-25 http://www.fiu.edu/~ogundira/Law_Historiography_of_the_Rise_of_Dahomey.pdf The Abolitionist Riposte: The impact of the Slave Trade The argument that the European demand for slaves was itself a cause of wars in Africa is already implicit in the work of John Atkins in 1735, though, as has been seen, he applied this interpretation to the cases of Allada and Wydah rather than to Dahomey. It was made more explicit, and given a clearer historical form, by William Smith (1744), who observed, apparently with specific reference to the Gold Coast, that The discerning Natives account it their greatest Unhappiness, that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the Traffic of slaves, and that before our coming they lived in peace. The argument was elaborated by the American Abolitionist Anthony Benezet, in a work published originally in 1771. Benezet claimed that Smiths remark is supported by a study of early European accounts of Africa, which show that the Africans then Generally lived in peace amongst themselves; for I do not find, in the numerous publications I have perused on the subject, of there being wars on that coast, nor of any scale of captives taken in battle, who would have been otherwise sacrificed by the victors. The subsequent prevalence of war, Benezet inferred, was due to the slave trade, the Africans having become corrupted by their intercourse with the Europeans and incited by warfare by drunkenness and avarice. The claim that African wars were caused by the European market for slaves thereafter became a commonplace of Abolitionist polemic, and the argument was soon applied to the specific case of Dahomey. Thus Forbes, in 1851 was in no doubt that his description of Dahomey served to illustrate the dreadful slave hunts and ravages, the annihilations and exterminations, consequent on the slave trade These wars are directly and instrumentally the acts of the slave-Merchants at Whydah and its neighboring ports. Although not originally worked out with reference to the case of Dahomey, this Abolitionist argument clearly worried the Anti-Abolitionist historians of Dahomey, Norris and Dalzel. Norris insisted that according to his reading of the records, Africa had always been like this: That the wars which have always existed in Africa, have no connection with the slave trade, is evident from the universality of the practice of it between communities in a savage state. The oldest writers, as Leo, and others, have represented the Africans as living in a continual state of war, and rapine, long before the commerce with Europeans was introduced among them..... Among recent historians, the Abolitionist picture of an originally peaceful society corrupted into violence by the European slave trade has exercised considerable influence. It was, for example, adopted and elaborated by W.E.B. Du Bois in his pioneering study of Negro history published in 1915. Dub Bois asserted that the evidence showed the supersession in West Africa of early costal cultures characterized by city democracy and developed craft industries, by despotic militaristic empires such as Dahomey, and also Asante.) His picture of Dahomey is wholly negative a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder Dahomey was the last word in a series of human disasters: the origins of the change are attributed unequivocally to the slave trade, and to the warfare which it encouraged. From Du Bois, as well as directly from the earlier Abolitionist sources, the view that Dahomeys despotic and militarized character was a consequence of its involvements in the slave trade was transmitted to later historians, including especially Basil Davidson (1961). For historians such as Du Bois and Davidson, seeking to project a more sympathetic picture of pre-colonial African societies, part of the attraction of this interpretation was clearly that it served to externalize in some degree the responsibility for many of the unattractive featured which they found in these societies.