The slave trade was a controversial issue for many people and still is even today. However, many of the leaders of European countries at the time of the slave trade were considered Enlightened Despots due to their reforms set in place to actually help the people and the betterment of the country. Also most of the writing at this time was observing treatment of slaves and most of the people in the world had accepted Enlightenment ideals or traditional christian values wherein both, everyone deserved rights. This is why it can be inferred that during the 17th to 19th c. there was not an absence of humanitarian concern for slaves when it came to the slave trade, but instead it was individuals who lacked humanitarianism while the rest of the world …show more content…
It was seen as necessity for a country to have slaves now since they needed them to do the work since the newly converted Christians had protection from slavery from the crown. Merrick Whitcomb describes this in his, Gold of the Indies (Doc 1). Whitcomb also goes on to describe how the Europeans treat the slaves imported from Africa. This is the first shift in the gradual switch to more humanitarian ideals. Writings like these eventually reached the mainland of Europe and let people have an inside look on how their countrymen were treating these people. Many people took first hand accounts of slaves being mistreated, such as the image of the Africans being thrown overboard (Doc 4). The person who did this most likely acted on his own to get a self-induced sense of power among other human beings. Although he might have been cruel to the slaves doesn’t mean a majority was in this time period. Also the image in Doc 3 shows Africans being rounded up and sent to get on the boats as they hikes through the jungles (Doc 3). This is an example of horrible things committed to slaves but the act of tying them up and mistreating them was not commanded by any government. Slaves were bought or captured by individuals who were looking to make a profit. People who acted like this showed but a small portion of the entire population and you can therefor not say that most Europeans were not
In the early 1800s the slave based goods became less needed because the industrial revolution started a new beginning for Britain. With all the new inventions such as the steam engine, lightbulb, steamboat, spinning jenny, railroad and the telephone, slaves weren’t really needed because they
Economic factors created an enormous market for African slaves. Slave traders found it very profitable to send slaves to the New World, where slaves were needed to work on the farms. Without laws in place to prevent this trade, slavery became crucial.
The year is 1776 and the talk of a new document is about. What did the document say? What would change? Would things still be like they are, like, would slavery still be the same or maybe even cease to exist? I’m sure all of the questions above where asked or thought about by the public.
Document 2, written by Ahmed Baba, a Muslim cleric of Mali, says, “…he should be set free directly…” referring specifically to Muslim slaves, but still expressing concern with slavery imposed on some people. Baba, while considering slavery imposed on non-Muslim African to be acceptable, still shows reservation on the institution as a whole because Muslims can be slaves. Document 3, written by an African slave and addressed to the Bishop of London, is a plea to the Bishop to grant more rights to the slaves to worship God more effectively and to let the slaves’ children be educated and taught to read the Bible. Overall, this document documents the harsh reality of slavery and shows an attempt at getting a Bishop across the Atlantic Ocean to realize this reality.
Because they were too weak it often resulted in them being abused worse because they weren’t doing exactly what the Europeans wanted to even though they physically could not. They were beaten and chained together. In document 8 it says the slaves were cut, mangled, and all together treated with no respect. There was no respect for their lives and they were treated like animals. They were burned with an imprint to make it known that they were owned.
With the conquest of the newly-found Africa, came the introduction of slavery, which led to the enslavement of nearly 7.7 million African slaves by Europe between 1492 and 1820. The Europeans believed that this New World would provide them with the riches that couldn’t be found in Europe. Along with these riches, Europeans were also in search of religious and further social equality.
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano depicts an African man’s journey through slavery and freedom. Equiano was influenced by the British and eventually tried to persuade the British to abolish slavery. The expressions offered by Equiano symbolize a man of intelligence and understanding. During the eighteenth-century Equiano was known as an African and a British man. This paper will argue how slavery did not define Equiano’s intelligence as a man.
Since the British justified their acts towards the Africans by labeling them as an inferior race and that they were below all other groups of people, Africans were viewed as barbarians and treated as such. Working as a clerk in a sugar plantation, Equiano was a witness to cruelties of every kind, which were exercised on his fellow slaves in the Caribbean plantations. According to his testimony, African slaves that were brought to the Caribbean islands by the cargoes for purchase were exposed to the violent depredations of white clerks. Regardless of age, men and women slaves were assaulted and their body parts were cut off for mistakes that were not even worth the mention. This shows a domination of British slaveholders on the islands and
In 1619, America was first introduced to slavery when the first African slaves were brought to North America to aid and increase the production of lucrative crops such as tobacco. Between the 17th and 18th centuries, Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies and was looked at as the main beneficiary to be successful in any production. African-American slaves helped build America’s economic foundations from the bottom up and was looked at as a new nation. In the early 17th century, European settlers in North America resulted to African slaves because they were cheaper and more hard-working. The African slaves were more productive than the servants the Europeans used, which were mostly poorer Europeans.
Topic: The impact of the Atlantic Trade System on the birth of capitalism. Thesis Statement: The Atlantic Slave Trade played a significant role in the birth and development of capitalism in a positive way in Western World. Slaves sold as a property for profit and these profits contributed to the growth of modern finance and also slave labor in the plantation for Atlantic trade contributed to the development of capitalism in a way that it enabled more production and stimulated the economy of time. 1ST MAIN IDEA: Growth of the slave plantation gave rise to increase in labor and contributed to growing more fertile and abundant product.
One of the reasons is that it is very expensive and troublesome to transport a huge number of slaves across the ocean. People were treated horribly, but in those days such actions were not crimes. Even if we consider them as crimes, they can not be regarded as
In the Americas, the main exports were silver and cash crops, both of which required work that was terribly tedious and exhausting. This led to the overwhelming predominance of slavery in the Americas, since the Europeans were not willing to carry out the hard work themselves. When the Europeans found they lacked a workforce, the sought slaves elsewhere. While the people who were called slaves changed, the institution never did. The same mistreatment, torture, and horrible conditions were evident in American slavery until it was abolished centuries later.
All the real European forces were included in this undertaking, yet by the mid eighteenth century, Britain turned into the world 's driving slave exchanging power. It 's assessed that British boats were in charge of the constrained transportation of no less than 2-3 million Africans in that century. The Transatlantic slave trade was responsible for the constrained development of between 12 - 15 million people from Africa toward the Western Hemisphere from the focal point of the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It 's in no time saw as an unspeakable outrage. The slave trade not simply provoked the savage transportation abroad of a considerable number of Africans furthermore to the death of various millions more.
To some extent, they were even allowed to gain their freedom in the long run. As a result, there were different cases of slavery, which included criminal, military, war captives as well as debt slavery, but this varied
Furthermore, in the late 16th century, the price of Africans per person became £17 - £22 and in the 17th century they cost £40 - £50 per person. According to Anup Shah; “The growing demand and production of sugar created the plantation economy in the New World and was largely responsible for the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Allyn, Bacon, 1999, P215). Perhaps the second important reason for dominating Africans is that Europeans thought that they Africans are more suitable to the conditions of the weather than locals. They were taken because they could handle the heat and humidity due to their countries conditions.