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The effect of the Atlantic slave trade
The effect of the Atlantic slave trade
Economic effects of the atlantic slave trade
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In the 1500’s through the 1700’s there were extravagant amounts of ships exporting the continent of Africa. Ships carrying cargo so precious and vital that it shaped the world forever. Millions and millions of slaves from all over the continent of Africa were being shipped over to Brazil and Cuba. There are many similarities and differences in slavery terms between Brazil and Cuba, primarily focusing on agricultural production. Sugar production was very important during this time, both Brazil and Cuba proposed in this production. The two countries shared more similarities in terms of the production of agriculture and what they used the slaves for. They had more differences as far as the history of their slavery production. Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese established a sugar cane empire in a land surrounding the bay of saints. This region made the production easy because it was a very fertile growing ground for the sugar, the earth’s most profitable product at this time. At first the Indians were used to work in the sugar fields but the Portuguese soon found out that the Indians were not going to meet their needs. So the Portuguese turned to slavery in the 1500’s to meet the high demand for human labor. As the demand for sugar exploded, the number of slaves in Brazil exploded also, making Brazil have one of the largest slave populations in the world. For three more centuries after this Europeans transported Africans they captured to Brazil to work in the sugar production industry. No place on the hemisphere had received more slaves than Brazil. This process of slave trade was called the Atlantic slave trade, which marked the beginning of a long and tragic time period in world history. Only about 10 - 12 Africans capt... ... middle of paper ... ...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.
Slave labor is the final factor that drove the sugar trade and made it so successful. Slaves were the manual laborers on the plantations, doing the actual harvesting and boiling because the owner wasn’t there to do so (Document 8). Without the slaves working the farm, everything was pretty much useless. There is also a direct correlation between the number of slaves and the tons of sugar produced. This is shown in Document 9, where the island of Jamaica starts out with 45,000 slaves, and produces 4,782 tons of sugar. When the number of slaves increases by less than half to 74,500, the amount of sugar produced is more than tripled at 15, 972 tons. This clearly exhibits how slaves were essential to sugar
The origin tale of the African American population in the American soil reveals a narrative of a diasporic faction that endeavored brutal sufferings to attain fundamental human rights. Captured and forcefully transported in unbearable conditions over the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, a staggering number of Africans were destined to barbaric slavery as a result of the increasing demand of labor in Brazil and the Caribbean. African slaves endured abominable conditions, merged various cultures to construct a blended society that pillared them through the physical and psychological hardships, and hungered for their freedom and recognition.
The sugar trade lasted from 1492-1700s. The Sugar Trade was a huge worldwide event. It caused African people leaving their country to go work on the sugar plantations.
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.
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.
For years the European colonies in Latin America had made profit off the backs of slaves. They used them to harvest crops and produce goods for their economies. They had abused them and did not give them full equality as whites had in the colonies. By the 1770s, there are abolitionists who have been fighting for the rights of slaves, and many of them have seen or heard of the horrors of slavery. They work tirelessly to rid of the institution that many considered to be evil. However, many of these colonies do not feel that slavery should be ended, and they continued in their abuse of the slaves. Even before the 1700s, slaves have committed small acts of resistance in order to fight back against the injustices done to them. These acts however, did not gather as much attention as the future rebellions that would arise in the 1790s and the 1800s.When these rebellions did occur, such as the famous Haitian Revolution, and the fact that abolitionists have proved through testimonies and evidence that slavery was an evil institution, that many nations begin to reconsider whether or not slavery could be continued. In the case of France, they decided to give slaves in Haiti more rights partly due to the large scale of insurrections occurring on plantations. However, they still want to maintain control of Haiti. After Louverture had become the governor, later arrested, and the French failed to retake Haiti, they finally decided to leave the country alone, and take action against slavery. One example was how there was a law passed in 1818 which “declared that the captains of slave-trading vessels, if apprehended, would be deprived of their licenses and their cargoes would be liable to seizure”. Still the author does mention that the slave trades continue in secret. The Spanish as well as Brazil, who will continue slavery all the way up
Evidence of African roots are identifiable throughout Brazil. Brazil is the second most populated country of Blacks. Many different tones from mulatto to caboclo to black are present with culture that has flourished since African slaves first arrived to the country. The slaves that came to South America, brought their religion, gods, and music along with them, giving Brazil a cultural identity and a place among other nations. The profits of African slavery have allowed Brazil to gain capital and build a government based mainly on sugar exports. Although Brazil was the first to claim themselves free of racism, throughout history they often put slaves in even worse conditions than the US. Easy accessibility to import African slaves, meant that
Sugar in its many forms is as old as the Earth itself. It is a sweet tasting thing for which humans have a natural desire. However there is more to sugar than its sweet taste, rather cane sugar has been shown historically to have generated a complex process of cultural change altering the lives of all those it has touched, both the people who grew the commodity and those for whom it was grown. Suprisingly, for something so desireable knowledge of sugar cane spread vey slow. First found in Guinea and first farmed in India (sources vary on this), knowledge of it would only arrive in Europe thousands of years later. However, there is more to the history of sugar cane than a simple story of how something was adopted piecemeal into various cultures. Rather the history of sugar, with regards to this question, really only takes off with its introduction to Europe. First exposed to the delights of sugar cane during the crusades, Europeans quickly acquired a taste for this sweet substance. This essay is really a legacy of that introduction, as it is this event which foreshadowed the sugar related explosion of trade in slaves. Indeed Henry Hobhouse in `Seeds of Change' goes so far as to say that "Sugar was the first dependance upon which led Europeans to establish tropical mono cultures to satisfy their own addiction." I wish, then, to show the repurcussions of sugar's introduction into Europe and consequently into the New World, and outline especially that parallel between the suga...
Sugar plantations have a field where sugar cane stalks are cut and grown and then there are boiling house where sugar cane stalks are crushed and boiled which is all runned by slave labor. Because slaves planted the cane stalks, harvested sugar stalks, crushed them, and boiled the sugar stalks sugar was made(8). According to David richardson the slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic growth, “An Average purchase price of adult male slave on west African coast in 1748 was 14£ and in 1768 was 16£”(9a).Because slaves were so cheap slave traders may profit by, selling adult male slaves to sugar plantation owners for twice as much as they bought them in Africa. John Campbell Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade describes the slaves as “so necessary Negro slaves purchased in Africa by English merchants”(11). Because africa trade slaves to English merchants Africans got things they did not
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a service that transported around twelve and a half million men, women, and children to be bought and sold as slaves by countries mostly in the New World, like the United States of America. (The Transatlantic Slave Trade) The Portuguese were the first to bring African slaves over to the new world, but it quickly caught on over the years. Around 80% of the slaves that came across the Atlantic ended up in Brazil or the Caribbean Islands while only 7% wound up in the United States.(Ross) With the climate being completely different in South America, Europeans found it extremely hard to work and were not used to the living conditions so they contracted diseases. Unlike Europeans, the African slaves were capable of handling the climate and were used to working hard. (How Many Slaves Came to America? Fact vs. Fiction.) The reason the Transatlantic Slave Trade worked for many years was because it had a triangular trade form where Africa would send slaves over to America who would send the products of the slave labor over to Europe who would send ammunition and weapons back to Africa. There have been over 30,000 documented trips from Africa to the Americas. The trip from Africa to America lasted about three months by ships. This was called the middle passage, where a large amount of slaves died from malnutrition
The Atlantic Slave Trade was one of, if not the largest scale movements of human beings from one part of the world to another by sea and could have been considered a mobile killing machine because of the horrible conditions. The numbers were so large that the slaves who came by slave trade were the most Old-World immigrants in the world. Even though there were only races of people enslaved during the Atlantic Slave Trade, African Americans were the most numerous. Records show 34,941 voyages during the time of the slave trade. The Transatlantic Slave Trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean in the 16th century and lasted till the 19th centuries. The way that the Atlantic Slave Trade came about was cruel but not unthinkable. The capture and enslavement of African Americans was inevitable, the only question was when. A lot more slaves were taken to the South America than to the North America because the South “needed” them more. The South Atlantic economic system was based on producing crops, making goods and other things to sell. The enslaved people didn’t just skip into the ship with smiles on their faces. The Spanish colonists asked the King of Spain for permission to bring slaves to The New World to provide for them. Spanish Colonists were currently forcing Native Americans to do their labor for them but they were dying in large numbers because of diseases and lack of care from the colonists. The King of Spain gave approval to the colonists to import Africans and from then on Africans were transported there for use and labor and other needs of the Spanish colonists. During this time many African American slaves were transported. An estimated twelve to fifteen million African Americans were shipped throughout the world includ...
The 1600’s were a time of expansion in the new world. Unfortunately the development of this area led slavery to be the main source of labor. As history teaches us slavery was used extensively in the new world. The main areas of concern of this paper are how slavery in the Caribbean carried over its practice in the American South. The slave system was implemented in the Caribbean on a larger scale before the South implemented their system. The slave plantations of the Caribbean served as a learning platform for the slavery system in the south. The development of Caribbean slave laws, slave revolts, transfer of information on this practice to the South and the South’s implementation of these slave laws, and the slave issues in check.
The concept of the slave trade came about in the 1430’s, when the Portuguese came to Africa in search of gold (not slaves). They traded copper ware, cloth, tools, wine, horses and later, guns and ammunition with African kingdoms in exchange for ivory, pepper, and gold (which were prized in Europe). There was not a very large demand for slaves in Europe, but the Portuguese realized that they could get a good profit from transporting slaves along the African coast from trading post to trading post. The slaves were bought greedily by Muslim merchants, who used them on the trans-Sahara trade routes and sold them in the Islamic Empire. The Portuguese continued to collect slaves from the whole west side of Africa, all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), and up the east side, traveling as far as Somalia. Along the way, Portugal established trade relations with many African kingdoms, which later helped begin the Atlantic Slave Trade. Because of Portugal’s good for...
The Slave Revolution in the Caribbean Colonists in the eighteenth century created plantations that produced goods such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and more importantly, sugar. These plantations required forced labor, and thus slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world. “The Caribbean was a major plantation that was a big source of Europe’s sugar, and increasing economic expansion. The French had many colonies, including its most prized possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti). ”
Unfortunately, however, sugar became very scarce due to the climate in which it was raised in. As a result, the fact that sugar was a sign of status, as mentioned earlier, is because salt became every expensive, and people who were in possession or able to afford sugar were seen as the more rich social group. In an effort to grow more sugar, explorers from Spain, Portugal, and other European countries found out that the Caribbean was a great place to grow sugar. began building sugar plantations in attempts to satisfy the demands of the people who wanted to use it to sweeten their foods. Sadly, these plantations required a lot of workers. At first, this wasn't a problem. Disastrously, when Europe was riddled with disease, plantation owners were desperate for workers to keep the sugar production flowing. As a result, they turned to Africans and enslaved them. This kept the sugar production flowing at the expense of a high mortality rate. This sugar production eventually helped the Caribbean