Sugar In The Caribbean

It can be argued that slavery in Latin America was not only more common; but also more brutal. Their lives were short and they were expected to live from five to six years, which was considered a large profit to the slave owners, as they were able to purchase new and healthier slaves with no financial loss. They were also heavily mistreated; being forced to work for hours under the scorching sun, with terrible living conditions and poor nutrition. Slaves were seen as barely human, and the loss of one only meant the loss of the slave owner’s financial gain. Sugar was produced by the masses, but it cost thousands of human lives.

Expansion of slave trade was caused by the high demand for cash crops like tobacco and sugar. American colonies were in need of a cheap labor force and saw Africans as fit for the job since there were so many of them. Indentured servitude was just not working for the colonies because of the intense work needed to be done to farm cash crops. Another cause and effect argument Nash uses is that the English entry into the slave trade business allowed southern plantation owners to buy slaves more and for cheaper than ever before. But how did all these slaves get to the colonies?

They soon coerced the natives into working on sugar and tobacco plantations as slaves—the conditions were horrendous and life was short and brutal. Because European explorers brought along their native diseases (such as smallpox and tuberculosis), the native population was soon dramatically diminished. This meant that Caribbean plantation owners had to import in African slaves. This rejuvenated the African slave trade, which became an essential part of the global economy. Russian serfdom, however,

Runaway slaves were very common, slaves killing slave masters; and slavery as an established legitimate institution was cracking at its base. White people realized that most black people and mulattoes would prefer to return to their African motherland than to live in servitude. Thus in 1821 the American Colonization Society bought a large piece of land (43,000 sq. miles, almost half the entire new country) in the west coast of Africa "Cape Mesurado". The site then was called Grain Coast by the Portuguese because of its valuable crop called "Pepper."

By 1860 a majority of African Americans lived and worked in the Deep South, the lands that stretched from Georgia to Texas.” Though 1800 and 1860 the African American population moved throughout the country to new established lands in the south and southwest areas for a few major factors. The change in the countries cash crop drove the slave market to new areas of the country. The crops effected the economy within the Chesapeake area so a new source of revenue was established. The new revenue came about with the need of slaves to work the new areas so the domestic slave trade was born. The slave trade contributed to about 1 million slaves being migrated around the

Slavery in Haiti during the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth century was a very contentious issue. The sugar farms in Haiti accounted for much of the French economy, and slaves were necessary to farm sugar at the rate that they did. Haiti alone had 800,000 slaves, which was good for most in the world. Additionally, the sugar plantations had dangerous working conditions, and a high death rate. Toussaint L’Ouverture was born a slave on one of the plantations and given an education, something that most slaves did not get.

Before the European settlers arrived in America even the Native Americans had their own slaves. Slavery was a very argumentative issue in America and, in fact, was the root cause of both the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War. The importation of slaves to Europe began when the Portuguese Crown gave up its monopoly of the slave trade in Europe leading to private ownership of slaves. This caused the European settlers, especially the Portuguese, to bring more slaves to the Americas directly from Africa. The Spanish were the first to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola with the first African slaves arriving in Hispaniola in 1501.

There, labour was needed and labour was available but in different places. The need for labour sprang from the inherent demographic difference between the Americas and South Asia, from the impact of European expansion and from the specific labor tasks that the colonists required. The Atlantic slave trade paid much attention to the role of the slave trade in British North America and West Indian colonies. According to Kenneth Morgan (2007: 18) “the transatlantic slave trade was an important business enterprise within the British Empire for nearly a century and a half, from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 until the trade was abolished in 1807”. In this period the slave trade and its capital turnover made a substantial contribution to the economic development of the British Empire.

The cotton gin was a simple machine with the sole purpose of separating cotton fibres from it’s seeds, drastically lowering the production costs of cotton. Previously workers were required to separate cotton fibres from it's seeds by hand, a process that required multiple hours to produce a single pound of fibres. Using the cotton gin however slaves could produce more than 50 pounds of cotton, in a single day. The vastly expensive cotton prices decreased simultaneously, leading to a growth in popularity of cotton clothing. This lead to South American farmers devoting more time and land to cotton plantations.

Like for example, their economy was going through a major downfall which occurred due to their crash in “agricultural production of coffee, spices, indigo and sugar.” Problems in the nature of these, didn’t just go away, they took effort and time. Speaking of time, which was very limited during the revolution, many resources were wasted which made it very hard for the Haitians to survive. The lives of slaves were hugely impacted after the revolution as slavery was abolished entirely in the nation. Haiti was the second country in the whole world to be freed from a European power