The slave trade impacted Africa’s population, turning it into half of what it was expected to be in 1850. Organization of the Trade: 1. Triangle trade is a trade network in which slaves from Africa were carried to the Americas, sugar, tobacco, and other goods were carried from the Americas to Europe, and European products were sent to the coast of Africa to trade for the slaves and start the whole network. African Societies, Slavery, and the Slave Trade 1. Europeans made slave trade acceptable by saying that is was already practiced in the continent and they were not the first.
However, the Portuguese—looking for workers for sugar plantations in Brazil—increased the demand for slaves. During the 1600s, Brazil received more than 40 percent of all the Africans sent to the Americas. Other European colonies also brought slaves to work on tobacco, sugar, and coffee plantations. About 400,000 slaves were brought to the English colonies in North America. Their population increased over time, though, to number about 2 million in 1830.
The Caribbean islands were a great place for sugar to be produced because of the warm climates, rainfall, latitude, and soil composition (doc. 2). Since the sugar was produced from colonies it was exported cheaply to England where it was processed and sold back to the colonies for money which benefited the ‘mother country’(doc. 12). To buy an adult male slave on the West African coast was on 14 pounds in 1748 and to sell a slave in England during the same year was 32 pounds(doc 9).
Between 1790 and 1861, the year in which the Civil War began, plantation agriculture expanded, therefore, the demand for slaves increased. At that time, almost one third of all Southern families owned slaves -fifty percent in South Carolina and Mississippi alone- bringing the total number of southern slave owners to an estimated 385,000. The Southern economy was almost completely reliant upon slavery and the slave trade. To advance this agricultural wealth, money was invested back into slavery. Needless to say, southern slave owners were not willing to abolish slavery because of the money they stood to lose.
Many similarities arose with in the colonies mostly the hope of gold, resources, and virgin lands drew English colonists to the Southern Colonies. Their economy was driven by plantations, initially worked by indentured servants, a labor force which was largely replaced in the early 18th century by slaves imported from Africa, except for Georgia, where most plantations were worked by debtors. Colonial South Carolina relied mainly on the Indian slave trade and deerskin. Rice plantations, and later other cash crops like cotton, worked by African slaves overtook the Indian trade as the colony's economic foundation. The ports of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia traded with Great Britain slave ships from Africa and the Caribbean.
The Middle Passage The middle passage was when African Americans were forced to go from the West Coast of Africa to the Caribbean’s where they were marketed, and sold for profit to the plantations owners. This journey was listed as the “Middle Passage” because it was considered the middle leg of the trading triangles, and this was constructed in the early stages of the colonial period. The Middle Passage started from even before 1619 an it was the arrival of the very first African slaves in British Northern America. However, as it developed it was initially amongst Portuguese and the West African mariners in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The Africans were taken or for better word use they were kidnapped by the Europeans and, by other Africans mostly for trading spoils of
How did recently freed English indentured servants affect the development of slavery? The Englishmen, who came to Virginia as indentured servants, once freed, spread up Virginia’s rivers and coasts, creating their own households and plantations, similar to the ones they had once worked on. In only a few years, they too would have slaves working on tobacco farms, earning them 10 to 12 pounds a year. Without these servants being freed, slavery would not have spread past Virginia and into the rest of the colonies; thus, prolonging the existence of an economy reliant on
African slave labor became vital to Saint-Domingue’s economic development; one of the primary reasons that Haiti was such a productively rich land was because of slave labor. Under French colonial rule, nearly 800,000 slaves arrived from Africa, accounting for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1783 and 1791; many died from disease and the harsh conditions of the sugar and coffee plantations. Statistics show that there was a complete turnover in the slave population every 20 years. This huge slave population was ruled by a white population that by 1789, despite the short life expectancy
So as Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mocking Bird” would say, “let’s try to climb into one’s skin and walk around in it”. Approximately half a million Africans were brought over from Africa during the slave trade. Due to the law saying that the offspring of a slave was automatically considered the same, the slave population in the U.S grew rapidly to 4 million by 1860. Indian slavery was practiced as well in the 17th century, but mostly were slaves from Africa. Slaves were needed by many reasons to serve rich and higher class
African exports consisted primarily of gold, ivory, and pepper. However, over 175,000 slaves were also taken to Europe and the Americas during this period. In 1600, with the involvement of the Dutch and English, the magnitude of the slave trade grew exponentially. From the time of their arrival on the shores of Sierra Leone in 1460, and until their gradual decline as leaders in world exploration in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had an ambiguous relationship with their African trading partners. Disembarking at cities that were equally large, complex, and technologically advanced as Lisbon at the time, the Portuguese actually experienced far less culture shock than we might