How Did Sugar Cultivation Affect Europe?

Randy Sparks highlights a rare aspect of the history of slavery: the relentless effort of the enslaved to use their privilege to free themselves. Although it is not clear when the European and Africans first encountered each other in Old Calabar, it is evident that the constant trading between both parties built a concrete means of communication. As many individuals who have

Back in the early 1800’s, the color of one’s skin mattered amongst African Americans and Caucasian people. There was infidelity between the Caucasian slave owners and the African American slaves. Of course, the outcome of that produced a fairer toned child. In most cases the child could pass as white. The mixed toned kids got to be inside doing housework, while the dark Negroes worked in the fields, under extraneous work conditions,”their dark-toned peers toiled in the fields”(Maxwell). From the early 1800’s to modern day, there is controversy that light or bi-racial African Americans are better than dark colored African Americans. African Americans had to go through tests to see if they were able to receive priviledges

This tolerant attitude led to a wide range of “race classification.” According to how much “white” a slave had, their value in the eyes of society increased. Slaves could be black, octaroon or mulatto to name a few. Thus this led to a classification based on one’s degree of white blood. In the United States no such classes existed. If a slave was born to a black mother, that slave was black. In essence, Latin America judged based upon the degree of “blackness” while the South saw only two races, black or white. Outward appearance, the color of the father or anything else deviated the classification in the United States. It has been said, half-facetiously, that Southerners are color blind, in the sense that individuals, despite their racial composition, are considered to be either white or black, while Latin Americans recognized degrees of blackness and whiteness.

1). Although racism and colorism are different terms because race and color are distinct, they are interlinked (Harris, 54) since color is a characteristic to categorize people into a racial classification (Jones, 1487). Skin color discrimination arose when slavery was introduced to the New World and is still maintained by white superiority (Hunter, 238, 239). Slave owners developed a skin color stratification in their plantations, where light skinned slaves had few more privileges over dark skinned slaves such as working in domestic tasks inside the house in contrast to working on the fields, which was undoubtedly a harder labor task (Hunter, 237, 239; Hunter, 177; Hill, 79; Okazawa-Rey et al., 92; Coard et al., 2256, 2257; Patton, 28). Light skinned slaves were offspring of the relationship between slave master and slave women and therefore had privileges that were inaccessible for dark skinned slaves to have, for example if the slaves offspring was lucky enough, the master could freed them.

One of the most impactful immediate effects of the slave trade was the effect it had on the population of West Africa. In class, we discussed how the original targets of the slave trade were typically young males. Because of the rapid drop in the male populations, the women of West Africa had fewer men to reproduce with and the population quickly

”European ships brought manufactured goods to Africa, trading them for people. They carried Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas where they were sold into slavery (The Atlantic Slave Trade).” Europeans fueled trade by selling African slaves in exchange for sugar, coffee, and tobacco, impacting economies in both, Europe and the Americas. Further, another triangular network between the English colonies, West Indies, and Africa, led to the trade of numerous commodities including slaves, rum, sugar and molasses. From an economic standpoint, the increased demand for African slaves became integral to trade between the three nations fueling the growth of various trade networks.

First, African slavery was very different than normal slavery, like in America before it was abolished. In Africa, slaves had very different opportunities compared to the slaves of another culture. Slaves in Africa could (depending on the location) be integrated into the slave owner’s family, or even obtain positions of military or administrative importance. Also, in early African culture, slaves were used as a way to determine land ownership. Before colonial officials imposed European law, African tribes distributed land based on the amount of laborers available to the family, thus beginning regular raids on other tribes to obtain slaves and by extension: land.

Enslaving a people takes more than just declaring them slaves. There must be certain actions done to get them to work and to coercive them to into working. The methods of keeping people enslaves are both physical and psychological. The distance from the African’s home and the violence forced them to work for their master. Reciprocal obligations and hope for earning freedom helped to convince that they needed to participate in the slave system to survive. All these methods of enslavement were necessary to maintain the enslavement.

In the early years African slaves were treated much like the indentured servants from Europe. Some even gained their freedom after a few years of service. However in the later 1600’s they were relied on more in the South as lifetime labor sources. “Slaves were most economical on large farms were labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, could be grown.”

Sugar plantations, for instance, the most important crop in the early plantation, had fulfill the demand of Europe’s sweet tooth elites around the Mediterranean. When European merchants began to trade around the Atlantic, they took the plantation model with them and spread them in the Americas. Since these plantations expanded rapidly, other European powers copied these when they had their own colonies in the Americas. For example, Columbus had become one of the major plantation. In the late 18th centuries, Cuba also became major sugar plantations producers. The sugar produced, thus the demand for labor also increased. All planters in Americas, Western Europe and Africa

The Slave Trade’s Effect in Africa The slave trade affected America and dug its roots into the country’s history. Africans were the majority of the American slaves and arrived in America in 1620. However, Africans enslaved their own people, other countries also enslaved and effected Africa in multiple ways. It effected the safety of the communities, the economy, the work force, education and growth of communities.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, plantation became a profitable investment. Sugar cane was booming cash crop. The demand for sugar grew, the Europeans fell in love with the taste of sugar. They came up with new ways to use sugar as sweetener and making rum. Sugar became essential to the european diet. The problem with cultivating sugar is that it required a steady supply of labours. Finding a constant

Globalization deals with the break down of traditional boundaries in the face of increasingly global financial and cultural trends. It is a process that results in the growing interconnectedness of the world. Globalization is understood as the force that promotes the global interdependence of economies, political systems, and societies. It creates a complex system of exchanges of goods, services, people, wealth, knowledge, and beliefs. Both Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat and Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power deal with the role of commodities in world history. Mintz analyzes the history of sugar production and consumption in Europe. Mintz discusses how the fall of sugar as a luxurious and exotic product to a necessity for the most common of the working class was able to command a revolution in diet and lifestyle, during industrialization and the rise of capitalism. Brook tells the story of tobacco’s route from the Americas to Europe. As tobacco became a commercial crop, it allowed for a new system of trade, further connecting Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Both works highlight the importance of each respective commodity in the linking of the global community. The integration of both sugar and tobacco in global trade had a profound impact on the power structures of society in the seventeenth century.

The African Slave Trade has affected a very large part of the world. This phenomenon has been described in many different ways, such as slave trade, forced migration and genocide. When people today think of slavery, many envision the form in which it existed in the United States before the American Civil War (1861-1865): one racially identifiable group owning and exploiting another. However, in other parts of the world, slavery has taken many different forms. In Africa, many societies recognized slaves merely as property, but others saw them as dependents whom, eventually might be integrated into the families of slave owners. Still other societies allowed slaves to attain positions of military or administrative power. Most often, both

The introduction of slavery changed the hierarchy of the society. There was now a division between the free and the owned. But the distinction was purely based on class and not race. Race as a biological concept did not develop until the late 19th century. However, Charles Boxer notes that “One race cannot systematically enslave members of another race without acquiring a conscious or unconscious feeling of racial superiority.” To 17th Century Dutch, black was the opposite of what they considered normal and attractive and this was reinforced by the cultural