Dehumanization of the Slave Trade
Bare feet walked across the rocky dirt road. Hands, feet, and wrists chained together. A long line of black people, men and women and even young maturing children. Beaded up hair from the water and sweat dripping from their filthy bodies from the hot desert-like sun beaming upon them. Dusty looking skin from the times they fell and tried so hard to get up. Empty stomachs; starving people; black people. Some naked and some clothed. They have been walking for some miles, being pulled along, whipped continuously, and told what to do; by the white man. Flies buzzing around them. Rotten smells of all sorts. Swollen feet and hands from the treacherous journeys and over-bearing labor that they had to endure. They were slaves.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the labor of African Americans was in higher demand. This was due to the insufficient amounts of white and Indian indentured servants, for the use of agricultural labor. During the 16th and 17th century time periods, Brazilian and Caribbean sugar plantations were very profitable and the use of African Americans as the laborers/workers provided a model for the European colonists in North America. (historychannel.com)
Africans served as guides and soldiers in the journey of Mexico, however when they were brought to North America they were instead used to produce export crops, such as tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, which was a major source of wealth. Once this had begun the English settlers gradually begin to turn to black slavery to solve the labor shortage (history channel.com).
Spain and England engaged in the housing of slaves. In the 16th century Spain brought in 100,000 Africans. However England did no...
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...nized English, and religion, and the other aspects of the Western civilization, thereby creating their own unique culture that combined African with European elements. They tried to take over our minds, souls, and bodies, but only got what they gave us, nothing in return.
Bibliography
Funk And Wagnalls. "History of the Civil Rights Struggle: The Slave Era." History.com. 2005. World Almanac Education Group, A WRC Media Company. 17 Feb. 2006 http://www.historychannel.com/blackhistory/?page=history2.
Unknown. "People & Events Royal African Company established 1672." Pbs.org. WGBH and PBS online. 17 Feb. 2006 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p269.html.
Gaines, Ernest J. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. 63.
Gaines, Ernest J. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. 167.
Gaines, Ernest J. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. 192.
During the era of 1789-1850, the South was an agricultural society. This is where tobacco, rice, sugar, cotton, and wheat were grown for economic resources. Because of labor shortage and the upkeeps of the farm to maintain the sale of merchandise property-owners purchased black people as slaves to work their agricultural estate, also low- key sharecroppers often used slave work as their resources as well. As the South developed, profits and businesses grew too, especially those expected to build up the local crops or remove natural resources. Conversely, these trades regularly hire non-landowning whites as well as slaves either claimed or chartered. With that being said, the African culture played a significant role as slaves in the south
Beginning of the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans began to explore in the Atlantic Coast of Africa. They were mainly lured into the excessive trade in gold, spices and other goods without knowing about slaves in Africa. Nonetheless, Europeans had no success of taking over these African states to achieve all of these goods but later they did take over various regions in other areas. Africans seems to be willing to sell as many as 11 million people to the Atlantic slave trade to the Europeans. Thus, this makes them the first people to have slaves not the Europeans that forced them into this trade. Furthermore, at the start the Africans seems to have full control of the slave trade, but the Europeans came in and slowly dominated the trade without the Africans knowing. Later on, the trade was overturned and everything went back orderly.
The trans-Atlantic trade of African slaves contributed to maintaining progression of labor systems as well as promoting change in the British North American colonies. The slaves provided labor and helped produce the cash crops that were then exported to Europe where they traded the goods to trade with Africans for more slaves. The Africans enslaved each other and sold more slaves to be sent to the colonies in
Slavery, as an institution, has existed since the dawn of civilization. However, by the fifteenth century, slavery in Northern Europe was almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, with the discovery of the New World, the English experienced a shortage of laborers to work the lands they claimed. The English tried to enslave the natives, but they resisted and were usually successful in escaping. Furthermore, with the decline of indentured servants, the Europeans looked elsewhere for laborers. It is then, within the British colonies, do the colonists turn to the enslavement of Africans. Although Native Americans were readily available and were initially numerous, Africans became the primary slave used in the colonies because the Native American slaves could not fill the colonists' labor needs, while the Africans did.
Though the Atlantic Slave Trade began in 1441, it wasn’t until nearly a century later that Europeans actually became interested in slave trading on the West African coast. “With no interest in conquering the interior, they concentrated their efforts to obtain human cargo along the West African coast. During the 1590s, the Dutch challenged the Portuguese monopoly to become the main slave trading nation (“Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, NA). Besides the trading of slaves, it was also during this time that political changes were being made. The Europe...
African slaves were brought to the America’s by the millions in the 17th and 18th century. The Spanish and British established lucrative slave trades within Africa and populated their new territories with captured and then enslaved Africans. The British brought the slaves to their new colonies in North America to work on the large plantations and the Spanish and Portuguese brought the slaves to South America. Slavery within North and South America had many commonalities yet at the same time differences between the two institutions.
...hundred years ago, the Portuguese established a sugar cane empire in Brazil, one of the largest plantations on earth. Around the same time Diego Velasquez conquered the islands of Cuba creating the Havana also one the earth’s largest plantations. The two countries both Brazil and Cuba brought the first Africans to their countries as specialized workers in the sugar cane production. The establishment of the sugar cane production caused a high demand on workers that they did not have at the time to keep the economies booming. So they’re so called specialized workers became known as African slaves. Millions and millions of African slaves were shipped through the middle passage to work on the fields and plantations of Brazil and Cuba. An estimated 10-20 million slaves were brought to Cuba and Brazil at this time period shaping their countries economy forever.
An example of this activity, “By 1444, a ‘cargo’ of 235 enslaved Africans had been brought to Lagos in Portugal...using enslaved Africans on sugar plantations in Madeira, a Portuguese island off the west coast of Africa by 1460.” Kingdom of Ndongo, positioned along the west central coast of Africa, highly affected through this enslavement activity, is mentioned for the first time during the sixteenth-century as being “one of a number of vassal states to Kongo...and was the most
Despite being held at the bottom of the social pyramid for throughout colonial times, the labor of the colonies would prove to be far from useless. While vast, open land was turned into numerous plantations in the colonies by rich planters, the plantations could not purely be run by their owners, creating a great need for labor. This lack of labor would eventually be solved through the use of African slaves, but after the first shipment of slaves to Jamestown in 1619, few were purchased due to high prices for an extended amount of time. The planters, however, would be able to fulfill their need for labor through English indentured servants. Through the use of indentured servants, basically free labor was provided to land owners, while when freed, the servants would receive “freedom dues” which would help them become relevant parts of societies. Some of these freed indentured servants would then hire their own servants, creating a cycle of servants in the colonial economy. Later, indentured servants would give way to African slaves as the most efficient form of labor, a change that would revolutionize the colonies. While the use of indentured servants helped stimulate the colonial economy throughout the 1600s through labor and addition of new landowners, African slaves would be the thriving labor force in the economy in the 1700s, up to and through the American Revolution.
Slavery was an accepted way of life in America during the nineteenth century. Public sentiment on the subject formed largely from the writings of southerners who rationalized slavery’s existence. White people enslaved black people and believed the Negro race was naturally inferior and would benefit under the white man’s care. However, as Douglass pointed out in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, slavery provided no such benefits.
...ir production of cash crops. This created an increased demand for slaves. Plantation owners were now also importing large amounts of slaves to work their plantation. "In the [late] 1700s, 3 out of 4 arrivals to America were African, most of the time, slaves" (Citation 18, Eltis 15)
Slavery will forever remain a tragically horrific stain in American history not only because of the actual act of enslavement, but the treatment of the salves. Slaves were largely of Native American and African descent. The accounts of Bartolome de las Casas and Olaudah Equiano provide two uniquely different viewpoints on their experience of slavery. Defeated, displaced, and tortured, the natives and African people were involuntarily separated from their families and homes to be put in such conditions.
Slavery became of fundamental importance in the early modern Atlantic world when Europeans decided to transport thousands of Africans to the Western Hemisphere to provide labor in place of indentured servants and with the rapid expansion of new lands in the mid-west there was increasing need for more laborers. The first Africans to have been imported as laborers to the first thirteen colonies were purchased by English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 from a Dutch warship. Later in 1624, the Dutch East India Company brought the first enslaved Africans in Dutch New Amsterdam.
The takeover of Europeans in all of Africa is the European Scramble. The treatment of Africans was sacrificed for the materials and goods needed by the Europeans. The mistreatment caused Africans to rebel even though sometimes their battles were not won. In thirty years European troops colonized Africa in search for natural resources due to the impact of the Industrial Revolution. As a response Africans were enraged that their loved ones had to suffer, while others hoped for change and surrendered.
The need for slaves was important around the early seventeenth century due to the increasing European demand of lucrative crops such as tobacco. Slavery became so profitable within a few short decades that the ethics surrounding slave ownership quickly changed. Furthermore, as rice plantations became more prominent in the eighteenth century, the demand for African slaves continued to increase. As author Judith Carney describes in her book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, rice was not a crop that most Europeans knew how to grow, and therefore slaves often had to tutor planters in growing the crop, bringing added importance and need for African slaves to the area. The slave trade grew so drastically in the seventeenth century that by the turn of the century, many areas had more Africans than whites. Carney further exemplifies this in her book by explaining that in 1670, the first settlers that arrived in South Carolina had about 100 black slaves. By 1708, it was documented that slaves outnumbered the whites.13 This drastic change in population demonstrates the increased need and perceived importance of slavery in America at that time.