Importance Of African Slave Trade

Treated like items rather than people with families, the African slave trade tore people from their native land and caused mass controversy throughout the world. While some viewed it as a prosperous business that allowed for free labor, others saw the emotional and physical injustices caused by this movement. The ethical debate this “new business” sparked, created arguments both for and against the abolition of slave trade. Three prominent men who had key opinions on this topic were Malachy Postlethwayt, John Wesley, and John Newton. While Postlethwayt defended slavery and the benefits it created for the New World, Wesley and Newton, while not completely denouncing slavery, questioned its ethics and realized the dark villainy of the business. These figures sparked debate amongst men and helped create arguments both for and against the Slave Trade.

For more than three and a half centuries, the forcible bondage of at least twelve million men, women, and children from their African homelands to the Americas forever changed the face and character of the western hemisphere. The slave trade was brutal and horrific, and the enslavement of Africans was cruel, exploitative, and dehumanizing. The trade represented one of the longest and most sustained assaults on the life, integrity, and dignity of human beings in world history.

To understand the importance of Kara Walker’s controversial works, one must understand the significance of American slavery. Slavery is to America (not just the United States, but the Caribbean and South America, too) as the Holocaust is to Germany. Somewhere between ten and fifteen million Africans were forcibly transported from Africa to America as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, nearly two million Africans died during the voyage to America. Fifteen to thirty percent reportedly died during the voyages along the coastlines upon arrival. Altogether, anywhere from two to five million Africans may have died as a result of American

From the import and enslavement of Africans to the mass movement and genocide of a multitude of Native peoples, the captivity and enslavement of these peoples are among the worst travesties in the history of the United States of America. In Mary Rowlandson’s “A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”, she writes autobiographically about the Native American raid on her village, the capture of herself and others including her children and other relatives, the way she was treated by her captors, and her eventual release back into English custody. Next, we have excerpts from “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass. Douglass’s account of his life as a slave in the American south showed how horrendous

From the 17th to the 19th century, Europeans enslaved African people and forced them to perform exhausting labor. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn described the development of slavery by stating the contributing factors. For instance, settlers coming from Europe would station in Africa to force Africans to go to America and work on the colonists’ plantations. African slaves were brought to the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 to aid in the production of such lucrative crops as tobacco. In addition to being plantation workers, slaves would also work in the houses of their owners as butlers, cooks, and nurses for children. Furthermore, slaves were taken away, against their will, from their families, homes and countries. The conditions that they were expected to endure during the journey in the Middle Passage were horrendous. However, beginning around the 1860’s many people, blacks and whites included, worked to undermine and abolish slavery. They did so because slavery was inhumane and a crime against humanity. Efforts to undermine slavery were not limited to only blacks, as both blacks and whites contributed to the movements undermining and, eventually, abolishing slavery. This collaboration shows that even with ongoing oppression and discrimination, humans are capable of empathy and compassion, and are able to motivate themselves to take actions against the dehumanizing of others. Through songs, defiance, running away, and revolting

Several slaves preferred to jump from the boats and die in deep sea than being brought to countries like America and being traded like animals by slave owners. Approximately 12 million slaves were transported to the Americas between the 17th and 19th century in the so called “Trans-Atlantic slave trade”. Portugal was one of the first countries to transport Africans to America to work as slaves in sugar plantations in Cape Verde. This essay will focus on the processes that originated the Atlantic slave trades, how slavery emerged in the United states, and in the post-slavery life of African Americans.

In 1807 the British enacted the abolition of slave trade act. This banned the slave trade in all of their dominions and protectorates by 1834. By then, the Britain’s slave colonies had experienced the most economic decline and struggled to compete with other colonial empires. As a result they decided to end the slave trade in order to further their economic interest and still be able use the labor while still appearing as the humanitarians. After all, slavery was their most lucrative and profitable resource until its decline. Realizing this, they pressured the Seyid Said to abolish slavery in exchange for their support as a means to control the valuable resources Zanzibar had to offer. Knowing full well that the Omani economy was still heavily reliant on slave trade, removing it would severely impact their revenues and give Britain the ability to take over their market and control of the region.

To be a slave in the New World, or U.S.A would’ve been an extraordinarily painful existence, riddled with diseases, abuse and long working hours with bare minimum quality of life. Slaves of this time were according to Lou Smith, former slave, “were treated like dogs,” seen as a tool and an object used at the hands of slave owners. The process of capture, transport and slave life were all terrible, and induced much suffering.

The horrors of the New World Atlantic Slave trade system cannot be expressed in figures along. The humanitarian and cultural losses are staggering. Throughout this period, more than a million and a half died

The slave trade industry had a huge historical impact on our lives. So much so, that we've completely changed our whole dynamic about it. Although it's not so common anymore, there still lies some unanswered questions, like what were the economical advances for owning a slave back then? What did the slave owners gain from this, and why was Africa the only country targeted? How could they have handled the slave trade business either better or different?

“The African slave trade,” writes Gary B. Nash “is one of the most important phenomena in the history of the modern world.” The slave trade started in the late fifteenth century and prolonged for the next 400 years. Over those 400 years, approximately ten million Africans sailed across the Atlantic to America against their will. Shown in Red, White, and Black; The Peoples of Early North America, psychological, geographical and political factors affected the lives of slaves in early America; the masters subjugated the slaves through those means. In other parts of the Americas, as well as in the colonies, the slaves’ living conditions differed.

The Atlantic slave trade existed from the 16th to the early 19th century and stimulated trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Over 12 million Africans were captured and sold into chattel slavery off the coast of West Africa, and more than 2 million of them died crossing the Atlantic. These outcomes of the slave trade are rarely disputed among historians; the effect of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, however, is often a topic of debate. Some academics, such as Walter Rodney, insist that Africans were forced to take part in the slave trade, resulting in demographic disruption and underdevelopment in all sectors of Africa. Historian John Thornton acknowledges the negative consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet contends that it was merely an expansion of the existing internal slave trade which African rulers engaged in willingly. A final case made by Hugh Thomas completely contradicts Rodney’s thesis, asserting that the slave trade was not solely responsible for decreasing Africa’s population, and furthermore, that it was primarily beneficial to Africa’s economy and politics. The true outcome of the slave trade in Africa lies not entirely in any one of these arguments, but rests rather in a combination of all three. Although the Atlantic slave trade was detrimental to the economic and social development of Africa, the trade benefited a small portion of Africans, who willingly aligned themselves with

European nations shifted their interest from Africa’s gold to work due to many reasons; First they in need of cheap and large labor to match their products in their market. The African slaves were cheaper as compared to other continents and thus could be acquired in large numbers. In addition, African slaves were energetic and very resistance to infections and diseases. Besides this slave trade was being practiced in Africa and thus it was easy for the European nations to introduce the chattel slave. African slaves when shipped to the European Nations, they were taken to have a slave status, thus it was easy to maintain their slave status of blacks. There also lacked escape routes for African slaves and no where they could effectively

Slave trade is commonly referred to the act of transporting and selling of slaves from different geographical regions to different parts of the world. The people who were mainly involved in the slave trade were the black Africans. In 1815, slavery had extensively spread transversely in America since then it became a major business activity. The spread of this slavery made the affected parties declare war in order to terminate the trade. During that reign, there was the formation of the Union soldiers who would cope up slavery that had spread widely in the region. The soldiers played a major role since they were coping with slavery yet at the same time they preserved racist beliefs of the African Americans. However, it is evidenced that the soldiers greatly fought the war to end slave trade since they termed it as the basis that led to civil war. It is also stated that the enslavement in most parts of United States was mainly brought about by racism (Manning pg 4). Chandra argues that “soldiers placed slavery at the center of the war is to open rather than to solve a misery”. This simply indicates that their main aim and mission was to end slave trade which acted as the foundation of civil war.

What was the African slave trade like? Well, the slave trade in Africa was mostly African peoples taking and enslaving other, sometimes rival, African peoples. The newly enslaved people often separated from their families would then be taken and put into shackles, shoved below deck into a stifling and cramped environment; then left for the duration of the trip, surrounded by odious sights and smells. Slavery Throughout History: Biographies, Slavery Throughout History: Primary Sources, and the excerpt from Tribal Scars all include descriptions of this and further examples on how the slave trade in Africa violates articles three, four, and five of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.