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How Does Atlantic Slave Trade Affect Society

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In one instance of what is responsible for a great deal of transformation in the Atlantic world is the slave trade. Although the slave trade had an extremely large effect on the Atlantic world in both an economic and social manner, the social aspect is the key focus when discussing societal transformation in general. Specifically, in Africa, the slave trade was detrimental to the African population and society as a whole, as the population lost approximately sixteen million people to the Atlantic slave trade alone. In addition, another astounding effect of the Atlantic slave trade in African societies had to do with an unbalanced sex ratio. Since the primary gender preference of buyers in the slave trade were males, this caused a drastic decrease in male population back in African kingdoms and societies. “By the …show more content…

In the Americas however, particularly in Latin America, the social order had also been altered quite a bit, only in different forms. As a result of the slave trade, a new social hierarchy was put into effect. Over a matter of time, new social classes were created based off of racial identities that had resulted from imported slaves in the Americas. As a result of there being a limited amount of European women in nation-states such as Brazil, Portuguese men commonly found themselves in these sexual relations with African women. These relations actually resulted in an abundance of ethnicities and social classes based off of race, which would lead to the construction of a hierarchy. “Peninsulares (people from the Iberian peninsula) stood at the top of the social hierarchy, followed by criollos, or creoles, individuals born in the Americas of Iberian parents” (Bentley, Ziegler, Street-Salter

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