The Rise Of The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Today, many American’s are very prideful of being part of a Country that not only portrays, but also truly offer an abundance of opportunities for education, careers, housing, for many immigrants’ jobs, and most importantly Freedom. Currently the American motto is that there are no impossibilities, work hard to achieve highest potential and failure is not a negative innuendo, but a mark of the imprints of success. Nevertheless, as one researches and studies American history the stroll down memory lane is sad and disappointing. Use The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database website (http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search)1 take a stroll into the past during 1607-1808 the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade slaves took the place of what we call today America’s industry workforce. Unfortunately, during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the slaves did not have a choice, mistreated and stripped of their rights and dignity, dehumanized, and all for the purpose of commercialism competitiveness and industrial prosperity. As shown on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, during 1607-1808, the total number of slaves embarked on voyages to the Mainland North America was 360,999; however, these slaves experienced the highest form of cruelty and uncaring treatment

the author explains how African slaves were used for hard labor were initially prisoners of war between the states of Africa.

Everyone has their own understanding of what slavery is, but there are misconceptions about the history of “slavery”. Not many people understand how the slave trade initially began. Originally Africa had “slaves” but they were servants or serfs, sometimes these people could be part of the master’s family. They could own land, rise to positions of power, and even purchase their freedom. This changed when white captains came to Africa and offered weapons, rum, and manufactured goods for people. African kings and merchants gave away the criminals, debtors, and prisoner from rival tribes. The demand for cheap labor was increasing, this resulted in the forced migration of over ten million slaves. The Atlantic Slave Trade occurred from 1500 to 1880 CE. This large-scale event changed the economy and histories of many places. The Atlantic Slave Trade held a great amount of significance in the development of America. Africans shaped America by building a solid foundation for the country.

From the 17th century until the 19th century, almost twelve million Africans were brought to the New World against their will to perform back-breaking labour under terrible conditions. The rationalizations and defences given for slavery and the slave trade were absurd and self-serving. Slavery was a truly barbaric, and those who think that they can control what another group of people eat, where they sleep, whether they are to live or die, or even whether they are to be bought or sold, are acting on a totally inhumane level.

The African experience of systemic slavery and its components represents the forced submission of their self through the stripping of their identity and rebirth of a free African into an enslaved African. This transformation of mindset began from free person to enslaved was a difficult one for Africans, who placed extreme pride and love for their homeland and culture. The journey of becoming a slave began on African soil in the barracon when the African were shorn and unclothed; a symbol of their culture being taken away.. In contrast to Europeans standards of wealth and harsh systemic slavery, in African slavery, a slave had an opportunity to rise above his station and his value was in terms of quantity as a person rather than the European standard of a commodity. These cultural differences also played a very central role in the African salve trade.

During 1619 was the first time North America would see slaves (history.com). At the time it was unknown as to how long slaves would be kept in bondage and to labor the goods of the whites. Many slaves had been kidnapped, traded, and sold. The South was pro-slave and the reason black slaves would end up freed (Goldfield 2007). Abolitionism began during the early 1830’s when Christians realized that slavery was opposite of their belief and a sin (http://americanabolitionist.liberalarts.iupui.edu). This lead to the “Abolition Movement,” that would eventually help to free some of the slaves. Post Civil War slavery during the 17th through 19th centuries, in Southern United States, the growth of slavery, the system, free slavery, and abolitionism.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade took place through the fifth teen century to the nineteen century in the Atlantic Ocean between American, Europe and Africa. The Trade blossomed dur due to the expansion of sugar production increasing the labor supplied need , which caused a the higher demand for slaves. The expansion of sugar created organized business of seizing and selling slaves. But the transatlantic slave trade did not begin the capturing of Africans, European were capturing slave long before the slave traffic developed. The Portuguese were the first European that started to explore western Africa. When returning to Portugal they took 12 Africans as a gift back home to their king, this was one of the earliest experience of European

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

In 1969 Philip Curtin described the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade as a “Numbers Game.” Curtin found that historians conceptualized the commodification of human beings through quantification. A year earlier in 1968, Frederick George Kay claimed in The Shameful Trade that fifty million Africans were exported into slavery in foreign lands. Twenty years later, Paul Lovejoy offered a summary of the field. He argued “that known scale of the slave trade was on the order of 11,863,000” Africans were exported into bondage. Then ten years later, in 1999, the work of David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein was published as The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. This work built upon the work of other historians who have largely dealt with the issue of the Atlantic Slave Trade by counting and quantifying human suffering. This database slowly grew and now includes documentation “on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.” This database has made it easier to quantify the Atlantic slave trade. Historians now could use the power of a computer to understand the sheer number of transportations. With the publication of this database it seemed likely that historians would continue the “numbers game” and get to the heart of the Atlantic slave trade. However, recent work on the Atlantic slave trade has gone in a different direction.

The Slave Trade gave power to many and found support from influential people, leaving those who did oppose the immorality of the operations terrified of the repercussions of speaking out against it. Lives were shaped by the slave trade; countless groups of people were growing prosperous and powerful (14). “At the top [there was] a small, high, and mighty Atlantic ruling class of merchants, planters, and political leaders, who, in ruffles and finery, sat in the American Continental Congress and British Parliament” (14). Likewise, selling, transporting, and using of slaves had become lucrative operations and were heavily protected by this ruling class. One such example is found when a pirate by the name of Bartholomew Roberts terrorized slave

For nearly five centuries – from the 15th century at the onset of the trans-Atlantic slave trade up to the 1950s when African states began to win the struggle for independence, Africa was exploited as a continent. The natural as well as the human resources were taken with no returns. This great pillage led to a complete halt of trade in Africa. Trade implies an exchange, yet the human resources were taken as slaves and the former colonial masters took the natural and mineral resources without the consent of Africans through imperialism.

According to Ugboajah “Trade across the Atlantic began in the 15th century as the direct result of the pioneering exploration of Africa financed by Henry the Navigator of Portugal.” (p.107) gold, ivory, dyewoods, gum, pepper, sugar, leather, bees-wax, coffee and a few commodities like palm oil where some of what was exported from Africa during the Trans-Atlantic trade. This also allowed Africa to receive materials back from the Europeans that included cloths, guns, gunpowder, hardware, salt, gin, rum, brandy, beads, cowries, iron bars, copper bars, and manilas. This trans-Atlantic trade also had some negative impacts on Africa, the negative impact of slave trade across the sea, this can be seen as one of the most corruptive influence in the

African slaves throughout the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade were treated with the utmost disrespect. Furthermore, when the slaves were transported to the New Worlds (current day United States) they were auctioned off to their future owner and from there the slaves would spend the remainder of their life working on plantations or mines in cruel conditions. The majority of the enslaved Africans would be taken to the more southern states in the United States. This was because the southern states approved of slavery while the northern states did at first, but soon abolished slavery much sooner than the southern states. This information can be seen implicitly seen in source 1 Distribution of slaves (1820, Primary). Furthermore, African slaves had to abide by a very strict set of rules/laws that were specifically applied to them on the plantations. If any of those rules/laws were broken severe punishments would be issued towards the slave. Some examples include: if a slave was in possession of a weapon, that individual would receive up to 35 slashes from a whip, and sometimes after being whipped salt would be poured into the flesh wound causing even more intense pain to the African slave. The aftermath of the whipping can be explicitly seen in source 2, slave whipping (Wooden engraving. Primary. 1861) If an enslaved African attempted to escape and was caught by the plantation owner, he would be corrected by first being whipped, then would be forced to wear a slave collar/punishment

Upon the discovery of new lands all over the world, the European countries sought after ways to capitalize on the colonies and the indigenous people living in the newly conquered lands. The earliest Atlantic slave trades are dated to the 15th century, when the first major European world powers the Portuguese and Spanish empires who forcibly transported slaves from Africa to America for cheaper and easier controllable labors1. The slave trade culminated during the 18th Century with millions of Africans being shipped when the rest of the European naval powers such as Britain and France invested in the slave trade.

From the seventeenth century on slaves became the focus of trade between Europe and Africa. Europe’s conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit to work in the tropical conditions of the New World. The amount of slaves took across the Atlantic Ocean slowly grew, from around 5,000 slaves a year in the sixteenth century to more than 100,000 slaves a year by the eighteenth century.