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Essay about Atlantic Slave Trade

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Johannes Postma was the author of the book called “The Atlantic Slave Trade” and was born in Zwagerbosch, Netherlands in 1935. He received his PhD from Michigan State. He is now a professor at Minnesota State University and has written “The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade”. As well as co- editing of “Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic trade and Shipping.”

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest and longest ongoing international voyage in human history. Taking place as early as the 1440’s, the slave trade gives valuable account for the trade in slaves from various parts of the world. The author gives a regulation from West Africa to as far as the Arabic region along southern parts of the Mediterranean Sea into a …show more content…

They added significance to my already present historical knowledge because it described everything in detail from the way that the institution of slavery has been a common feature of many societies from ancient times to the present to the book “Way of Death” by Joseph Miller. He tired to capture the agony and dangers that slaves had to go through on the marches in Angola; he wrote: Exposure to the dry- season chill in the high elevations and to the damp nights in open path side camps, utter lack of clothing and shelter…Contributed to the appearance of respiratory ailments…[Slaves] grew weaker and more susceptible to parasites and other diseases that swept in epidemic form through the coffles. The slave trade must have been a veritable incubator for typhus, typhoid, and other fevers…The…lethal consequences of malnutrition, disease, and other hardships along the path were death that rose at an increasing tempo…perhaps to catastrophic levels in the range of 400- 600 per 1,000 per annum by the time slaves reached the coast. It was a worldwide phenomenon, knows by different names and marked by varying degrees of explanation.
As historian Orlando Patterson said, “There is nothing peculiar about the institutions of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilization. There is no region on earth that has at no point

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