The account of African people in America starts with, and still conveys the legacy of, one of the most inhumane oppressions throughout US history, the establishment of slavery. African people were brought to America initially in 1619 (A History Of Slavery: 1619-1865. (n.d.)). At that time, slavery had not yet formed; the first Africans who were in America through the 1680s are believed to have been indentured servants. The earliest Africans were seen in the same light as indentured servants from Europe.
Harriet Tubman made it her mission and risked her life often to aid enslaved African Americans. There are limitless factors that led up to Harriet Tubman’s heroic events. Three hundred thousand African slaves were brought on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America between 1619 and 1780. The number of slaves imported to the colonies was relatively small at first, and then grew as the population in the new country ballooned. In the end, there were roughly 10 million Africans shipped as cargo to the United States.
It was in 1661 in Virginia that the first slave law was passed. All people of a darker skin color were considered in a state of servitude and subservient to those of a lighter shin color. Not all people of African descendants were slaves, there were about a million African Americans who were labeled “free men”. Those who did not have the label of “free men” were slaves to wealthy people of European descent, and had to do whatever their “masters” or “owners” told them to do. By this time American society had created not only a new social group, which was “African American”, but also a new sociological issue, which was called slavery.
Businesses would not have been as successful, it would have taken a much longer time to establish plantations and begin to sell product, and planters may not have been as successful as they were without the knowledge and man power that the slaves provided. These two ideas of slavery created a meaning of race and separation of race and in the types of work that different racial groups were forced to do. Before the English made the decision to bring West African slaves to the colonies to work for them, there were indentured servants. Indentured servants are people who the English colonists forced to work for them on tobacco plantations or wherever needed, for seven years. After the seven years were up, they were promised freedom and a chance to get started on their own journey to make a life for themselves.
Unfair trade rules forced on poor countries by the World Bank and IMF are having a disastrous effect on local farmers and are putting many of them out of business. Photographer Ian Berry travelled to Ghana with Christian Aid to document the impact of current international trade rules on farmers, traders and poor communities as they struggle to sustain their livelihoods. Just as the 18th century slave trade was about the abuse of economic power and foreign control, so international trading relations between rich and poor countries is much the same today. Is this trading injustice just a modern day slave trade? One of the most striking images of the exhibition was taken with Cape Coast Castle as an imposing backdrop to a thriving local fishing community.
Unfortunately because of the struggle to survive the African people adopted slave trade and started capturing and trading their people for European goods. Portugal’s started slavery in the fourteenth century with West Africa. The West Europeans developed a trading system in the sixteenth century but it was not successful as expected because the slaves tried to escape the hardship of labor. Later slavery expanded leading to the” Triangle Trade.” This was where ships left Europe went to Africa and then Americas. The Middle Massage was called “The Middle Passage,” because it was the second and longest part of a three part triangle trade that started from Africa and ended in North and South America, and the Caribbean.
Until slavery was abolished by Parliament in 1833, the island sugar plantations were highly dependent on slaver labour, based on Africans who initially were captured, kidnapped, and sold into slavery from peoples of West and Central Africa. By the eighteenth century, sugarcane became the most important export of the island. Many slaves arrived in Jamaica via the Atlantic slave trade during the early seventeenth century, the same period when the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America. By the early nineteenth century, people of African descent greatly outnumbered ethnic Europeans Due to the harshness of the conditions, there were many racial tensions. Jamaica had one of the highest number of slave uprisings of any Caribbean island.
Just as in any European country, people of the higher socio-economic status owned slaves to do labor. The trans-Saharan slave trade was in place by the 9th century and serviced societies of North Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean Enslaved Africans were used as soldiers, bureaucrats, and domestics (Ugo). Sometimes, in order to put focus on the transatlantic slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade is minimized. However, these two worked hand in hand. Dominating most scholarly discussions, the transatlantic slave trade is constantly under debate.
This gave certain African societies considerable advantages over rival tribes. Slaves were demanded in the Trans-Saharan network, because North African, Persian, and Arab merchants sought opportunities to resell slaves as field workers and domestic servants in Asia. The slaves captured and sold to foreigners generally lived harsh lives away from their families. When African slave suppliers ran out of slaves, chiefs organized raiding parties to seize individuals from neighboring tribes. Slave capturing was very violent, and many times wars were started for the purpose of capturing
Trade in iron, cotton and coal was growing, and so the British didn’t have to use slaves to work the sugar plantations anymore. But these are only the reasons on why the people weren’t so keen on the trade, not the reasons for why the trade was abolished. The reasons on why the slave trade was abolished are now going to be explained in more depth, and I will also decide which reason had the most impact and why. One of the reasons was the slaves themselves. Because they were forced to work and always punished badly for the slightest mistake, they were extremely unhappy and most hated they’re owners.