The Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonisation

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the atlantic slave trade and colonisation Abdi Muse Slavery is a social and economic classification system whereby people are required to work and treated like lowest type of human being; deprived of any freedom. There are several categories of slavery; the most common type of slavery is the chattel slavery, which is when people are treated like property. People are bought and sold in a market like commodity. ‘The English word slave derives – through Old French and Medieval Latin- from the medieval word for Slavic, a people of Central & Eastern Europe, many of whom were sold in slavery after conquest by the Roman Empire’ ( Yahoo, 2009) All throughout history, there was some kind of slavery. It was an established feature within many social structures. Many societies have had slaves and have been the source of slaves themselves; at one time or another. Even though slavery was a major feature of the ancient Greek and Middle Eastern societies, the roots of the early trade in slaves in Europe can be traced to ancient Rome and the Islamic world. The Roman republic depended upon at least 2 million slaves, a third of the Roman population, for agricultural produce and for domestic facilities. The majority of those slaves were taken from communities under Roman rule. In 1086, when William the conqueror’s Doomsday survey book was ordered, 10 % of the English population was slaves. (Eltis, David and Richardson, David. 2002). In Roman slavery the slaves could have been of any religion or ethnic background. It is contended that the link between blackness and slavery was made up by the Europeans in the Atlantic Slave Trade in the form of chattel slavery, using the bible as an excuse. In the 1943’s when the Portuguese sailor first sailed to the Atlantic coast of Africa they were interested in gold rather
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