However, European states are largely blamed for the slave trade, because of the large implications it had on Africa. African kingdoms were exploited for slaves in return for weapons, gunpowder and gold, which doesn’t compare to the millions of people that have been forcibly relocated to work as slaves. In the BBC News article by Will Ross, it is stated that “There has also been an impact on African culture”. With the loss of millions of people, African states had slowly lost their ability to gain economic, social and cultural independence, because as soon as slavery was abolished, European states immediately returned to colonise most of the continent. Ghana is a prime example of a country that had to deal with the burden of the slave trade where “the scene in many rural areas appears to have changed little with grass thatched mud-walled huts”, this is inadvertently caused by the transatlantic slave trade.
While traveling to the New World, slaves experienced the blending of different cultures within their own slave community. "When I looked around the ship... and [saw] a multitude of black people of every description chained together." (Document 6) This represents how slaves from differing parts of Africa came together because of slavery. Changed the way they lived by interacting with people from differing regions of the world. This impacted the slave communities culture by changing their cultural constructs.
Between 1787 and 1808, 250,000 new slaves arrived in the U.S. because of the cotton boom (2). Plantation owners were involved in the slave trade which was the transporting and selling humans as slaves. When selling the slaves, prices varied depending on the person's skin color, sex, age and location (3). In 1834, a man named Joseph Ingraham wrote about the slave trade said that “to sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’ is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit (3).” Families were separated because of the slave trade. Plantation owners would and could easily sell husbands from wives, parents from children, and brothers from sisters (12).
Introduction By the late 16th to the early 19th centuries slavery was taking place. Slaves were not being sold to different countries until The triangular trade broke out. Slaves were sent to different colonies to farm. The Triangular trade was a repeated system for trading and selling items. The trading system was used to trade manufactured.
Colonies began to realize the money that they could save from having slaves instead of servants, so they took the opportunity. Things like the Middle Passage and Atlantic Slave Trade made it very easy to make slavery the dominant labor system because slaves were plentiful. Just like ideas and crops can spread through colonies, slavery did as well. As stability in crops rose, so did slavery as the most effective labor system for southern
Slavery had been a tradition in African culture. Many states within Africa had practiced slavery through forced labor, debt bondage, as well as, many other forms. Slaves from the Muslim dominated North African coast had been tested but it was found that the slaves were too educated and thus were more prone to rebel. This seems to be an early indication that slavery was unethical, but it still prevailed centuries to come as the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade emerged. Was the failure of the recruitment of the Northern Coast slaves due to the intellectual properties of the slaves and could the solution to this have been to find less educated Africans in order to force the burden of slavery upon them?
As the needs of indentured servants increased, the owners believed they were not obliged to commit to the request of their servant. As a result, owners found that buying African Americans into slavery would suffice their working needs. It turned out that African Americans bought into slavery worked harder, which caused higher production rates. Slaves were also renewable and cheap to buy, so if one passed away, owners would just buy another one from the market and continue on with their production. Also as adults died their kids would also take their place as well because the children of slaves were also enslaved, so when they old enough to do and learn the basics of slave labor they would be put to work too.
The slaves knew a lot about growing crops. This is why the settlers forced them to work on plantations. The settlers had little to no experience in growing crops like rice. The slaves taught the settlers how to grow rice successfully. This crop was a cash crop known as the “Carolina gold”.
Furthermore, the black slaves suffered severe physical and mentally as “the crew often neglected to feed the salves, empty the tubs used for excrement, take slaves on deck for exercise, tend to the sick, or remove the dead” and were tightly packed in vertical shelves (Hine 32). Different from the other primary sources is that Primary Source #2 does not indicate that children are available for sale. In addition, the fact that the payment could have been made in “produce” hints that the seller might return to England with the produce marking the end of the voyage. Lastly, the fact that sale was held each day demonstrates that slavery was very much institutionalized in
This left only one option in the minds of the Europeans; African slaves. It is apparent that the labour shortages in the West Indies played an important role in the development of the Atlantic slave trade and while it can be argued that this was the most influential reason for the enslavement of Africans – it’s hard to imagine that those in the sugar trade would have particularly cared who grew the sugar as long as the