Slavery In Africa, Europe, And The European Colonization Of America

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.

By the 1630s, about 1.5 million pounds of tobacco was hauled out of Chesapeake Bay (and almost 40 million towards the 1700s). The Chespeake was hospitable for tobacco cultivation and it blew up the tobacco economy.

While slavery was a horrific thing that led to the mistreatment of millions of black people, it had the power to last for centuries. When looking closely at historical accounts it becomes easier to see why this horrible practice was able to sustain for so long. One of the reasons was because the economy of Colonial America relied heavily on the labor of slaves. Farming, the slave trade itself, and the harsh treatment of slaves were all driven by the greed of slave owners. Another reason that slavery lasted so long was racism. During this time, the black population was considered inferior to the white population. This helped to promote the cruel behaviors that occurred in slavery. Lastly, many whites actually felt that the slaves were treated

In the 15th century, the Portuguese started to explore the coast of Africa. The Portuguese began to transport African slaves to Portugal and Spain, thus initiating the popularity of buying and selling slaves. In the 16th century, Europeans began to trade African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Slavery was not a new concept to Africa. Many African leaders prior to popularized slave trade had traded other Africans to the Arabs as slaves. Most people that were sold into slavery were forced into it because they had committed a crime. However, many were sold into slavery because they were captured in raids. Europeans did not intentionally search for slaves, but if they came across Africans that could be captured, they took them. Africans brought slaves to the coast in efforts to trade goods for cheap labor.

Slavery as a practice has subsisted since the beginning of recorded human history, with evidence of the institution dating back to antiquity. What was particularly unique about the American Slavery system was that it was a system design to subjugate people based solely on darker skin colour. American slave-owners to justify the specific enslavement Negros used the idea of white “superiority” and African “Inferiority” for centuries. Eventually the concept of being a slave and being African were synonymous as the same thing. This raises a significant historical question; why did the connection between Africans and slavery emerge by the beginning of the 18th century? The following essay will explore how various historical, economic and cultural realities of the New World that fostered the racialization of American slavery to refer almost exclusively to African men and women.

Slaves were able to have some legal rights and opportunities for social nobility. Some slaves were served as generals in the army in the Muslim world, and a few slaves were being taught for positions of influence and power. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore Africa in the 1400s. The Portugal were responsible for transporting over 4.5 million Africans which was about 40% total, during the transAtlantic slave trade. It was not just the Portuguese to take over so many Africans, the Spanish and Portuguese did it together. The Spanish were able to take a lead while importing Africans to the Americas, meanwhile Spain was trying to move from the Caribbean and begin to colonize the American Mainland. The 300,00 Africans had labored throughout Spanish America on plantations while in mines for gold and silver. In the 1600’s while Brazil dominated the European sugar market the colony’s sugar industry grew and that made the European colonists demand more cheap labor. Meanwhile in the 17th century more than 40 percent of all of the Africans that were brought to the Americas went to Brazil. While England was stabilizing in the Americas and growing it started to dominate the Atlantic slave trade. By the time the slave trade ended, the English were able to transport 1.7 million Africans to their colonies in the West Indies.

“Slavery,” an issue some would say is complicated. So what exactly is slavery? What does it mean? And how did it come to be? These are complex questions that are often asked and possibly, by understanding the forms it takes and the roles such slaves performed. What daily life is like for those enchained and what can be done to end this demeaning practice may help in answering those questions. It is known that slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought, sold and are forced to work. It is also known that slavery was established in the history and economy of most countries. Even though it prospered during some periods and abstained in others, human bondage for profit has unfortunately, never been completely removed. Author Milton Meltzer, in his book “Slavery, A World History” follows this practice from prehistoric hunting societies; through the development of slave trading in the United States prior to the Civil War, it disturbingly reached a total number of four million slaves. He continues through the forced labor applied under the Nazi establishment and in the Soviet prison camps. And he concludes with the broad practice of slavery in many of the countries today, examples to include, women sold into prostitution in Thailand and the debt bondage that minors endure in Brazil.

Despite the limitations imposed by slavery, Africans and their descendants made substantial contributions to American culture in agriculture, cuisine, food culture and language. As for Cultural integration, such actions occurred during the transatlantic slave trade between West Africans and Central Africans and the European Americans was a forced interaction that cannot be reversed. The transatlantic slave trade in 1889, established a permanent link between Africa and North America as Africans sold into slavery transplanted their cultures to the New World.

African slaves were once captured by tribes of Africa, then working for and obeying whomever owned them. Though, they only had to serve as a slave for a given amount of time, usually only a couple years, and were then able to return home to their tribe and family to live a normal life. They were to enter under the “manumission contract” which allowed the enslaved to work until his or her can pay for their freedom, usually an agreed amount between them and their owner. This function of slavery was due to Africa and its people only using/ seeing slavery as a temporary solution in order to build their economy and villages/cities. This is one of the main differences between the European and intra- African slave trade, which set them greatly apart. The Europeans saw slavery and slaves as a permanent way of life for them, to live a long hard life of servitude, making the most of their money and the slaves always being in debt to them. Each trade, the trans-Atlantic and trans- Saharan, worked differently and were

Slavery is defined as “a legal or economic system under which people are treated as property.” While the legality of the system has varied at different times in different areas of the world, today slavery is illegal in all nations. However, it is estimated that there are still between 20 and 36 million people living as slaves today. Modern slavery takes many forms, including debt bondage, forced marriages, slavery by descent, and sexual slavery. Slaves are forced to work long hours without pay, often in demanding and even dangerous conditions. In addition, slaves are often physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by their owners, but as property they have no way of reporting this violence. Slaves also receive little to no education, so even if they manage to escape their situation, they often have a very hard time finding work, meaning many former slaves live in dire poverty. While in earlier centuries, slaves had been very expensive, today a slave can be bought for around $90, making it easier to replace a slave that is unable to

Early slavery in Africa was a product of conflict. People were enslaved as a result of unpaid debts or crimes they committed. Enslavement was also a tactic of war, but it wasn't necessarily a lifelong sentence. This type of slavery was very different from the slavery that would later occur as a result of European labor demands. People enslaved in Africa were often assimilated into tribes and even families. Even if that weren’t the case, they were more likely to have similar languages, ceremonies, cuisine and customs as their owners. Treatment of enslaved people varied between different regions of Africa, yet was still nothing like the treatment of enslaved people in the Americas. Depending on the circumstance, an enslaved person in Africa could

the number of people who lived in africa were very high. However due to the occurrence of slavery back in the eighteen hundreds, the population had sank by a whole 20%. Most of the african tribes in countries like nigeria, were invaded and the survivors had been kept to be enslaved for the Americans.

Contrary to popular belief, Mauritania, a country located in West Africa, is no longer the world’s slavery capital. In fact, merely 1% of Mauritanian citizens are estimated to be subject to slavery. In North Korea, however, nearly one in five people are subject to slavery. It is said that those enslaved in North Korea are compelled to work as political prisoners. North korea isn’t the only country with a slavery percentage that raises concerns. Uzbekistan, for example, is home to the second highest slavery percentage.

During the time of the Atlantic world the need for labours in the Americas was needed for the benefits of Europeans but to Africa's’ extent. Slavery had one of the most largest impacts on our known world. It impacted it in almost any way you can think of; weather it be economically, socially, politically, or just from our every day to day life. One of the most obvious causes of Slavery in the Atlantic world was that the practice of slavery. Slavery has been a thing for thousands of years, even though it may have not been the same kind of slavery practiced at the time, it definitely originate from other forms of less harsh and violent practices of the trade.

From the 1660ś until England had abolished the slave trade and put a stop to it in 1807, England was the leading carrier if enslaved Africans but the time it had ended they had transported 1.7 million slaves to the colonies of West Indies. But mind boggling 400,000 slaves were brought over to the what is now United states and sold to Britain's North American colonies. Many factors had shifted the Atlantic Slave Trade around, and it finally came to an end in