Between 1500 and the 1860s it is estimated that over 12 million Africans were abducted from West Africa’s coast and forced to work fertile lands cultivating crops such as sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton which was part of what we know today as the Atlantic Slave Trade. This essay will discuss the main reasons that the Atlantic Slave Trade began, these reasons are; deep-rooted racial attitudes, religious attitudes towards slavery, the legal position on slavery, military needs, the British economy, and the labour shortages in the West Indies. While it can be suggested that the labour shortages were the most important reason in the rise of the Slave Trade, this essay will argue that the deep-rooted racial attitudes towards Africans was the key
Why did British settlers in North America and the West Indies increasingly need to use slave labour between c. 1660 and 1807? Slavery is one of the most emotive issues in human history. Western slavery represented an aspect of the commodification of human beings for reasons of labor that is central to economic activity. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries European slavery was focused on the Atlantic world. There, labour was needed and labour was available but in different places.
In 1884 Berlin Conference was held to decide the future of Africa. They finalized to create free trade in the Congo region, free navigation and created rules to divide Africa among themselves. Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness during this period so, those historical backgrounds on colonization help to portray the theme of imperialism in this novel. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad portrays themes of imperialism in three different views through his main character Marlow. Therefore, this essay argues on how Heart of Darkness comment on Imperialism based on the power of the colonizers, the power of Mr. Kurtz and imperialistic view of Conrad over women.
The main and central objective of this dissertation is an effort to evaluate the post colonial thematic preoccupations in the African society and literature. It is an analysis of post colonial thematic preoccupations in the literary work ‘Arrow of God’ by Chinua Achebe and ‘Cry – The Beloved Country’ by Alan Paton. Both novelists have tried to depict the realistic condition of native African colonized people. Imperialism is a kind of aspect in which one country is trying to seek in expanding its power and authority by conquering other countries or by setting up economic and political dominance on the countries. Imperialism starts when one country or nation takes over smaller countries for their land and natural resources.
"They argue that the British governor, Frederick Lugard, favoured the reform of slavery over abolishing it". (Nwokeji 1998, p.321). According to Nwokeji (1998) the British colonial governor in Nigeria was Lord Frederick Lugard till 1919. "The so-called colonial development of Africa ‘for trade and civilization’ involved not only military aggression but also a considerable amount of coercive African labor" (Ekechi 1983, p.28). Some may argue that though slavery was abolished, nonetheless forced labour became a colonial policy in Nigeria, and maybe that was the sort of reformation of slavery that Lugard
1. Freedom was part of the colonial project and one of the most important justifications for the imperial occupation of Africa. The African continent was seen as an space of cruel slave domination. The slavery was understood as savagery, and the freedom as the main characteristic of the civilized world. Despite those interpretation, the relationship between freedom and slavery was less clear on the East African coast: ties originated from kinship and serfdom had a different meaning in this space.
Slavery existed in Western Europe and in Africa, however, it was fundamentally different from the Americas, as it was not centered around the color of one’s skin and how one looked. The colonization of the New World was built upon the principles of European financial and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world; African enslavement was a necessity that would allow this grand plan to reach fruition. While the act of slavery itself is inhumane, racial slavery is truly wretched and devalued human life to such an extent that millions needlessly died in the European pursuit of wealth and power. Europeans simply categorized everyone in West Africa as the same, to justify slave trade, ignoring culture, customs, and differences between tribes. Even though, Africa was already developed, Europeans lied about them as savage backwards people when such a reality did not exist, “In complexity and prosperity, many African societies compared with those of Europe and Central America” (Clark, pg.
The Atlantic Slave Trade is one of those topics that has a lot of controversies. There are people who believe that the trade did not influence the Americas and the Atlantic, while others believe that it did. The Atlantic Slave Trade did have an impact in the Americas and the Atlantic based on the book “Africa in World History.” Therefore, this is the view that will be presented in this paper. In order to understand how the trade had an impact, one must understand its past, how was the Atlantic Slave Trade different from other trades, and why were Africans the ones chosen for the trade. The Atlantic Slave Trade is known as the time period in which European navigators and settles captured Africans in order to get a profit on farming.
Unfortunately for many blacks who became slaves, they were traded as merchandise for goods. Even though Chattel Slavery was a system that was first initiated in Europe, it later did become legal in the United States. The legalization of Chattel slavery in the United States happened due to the fact that a trader who brought slaves into America. He kept bringing slaves into America as servants to him and other, this marking the beginning of legal Chattel slavery in the United States. It came to the point that black slaves were part of the Civil War.
After learning about the cruelties of the slave trade, and about how the immense profits affected Britain, I became curious about why the British public would choose to end slavery. If it was so beneficial to them, then why stop? I decided to use this topic for my assignment so that I could find more information about why the slave trade was abolished. When researching this, I found it intriguing that many of the factors that ended the slave trade were to do with people, rather than financial gain. I enjoyed using the abolition of the slave trade as my assignment topic, as it allowed me to learn surprising facts about the late 16th- early 18th centuries.