The Role Of The Smugglers

Daily Life through Trade: Buying and Selling in World History. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2013. Print.

•    Discuss the changes and continuities in the Silk Road trading network from 600 BCE – 1450

If there was ever an important period historians, and people could put a finger on, this would be it. This is the important period where the world’s countries, kingdoms, and dynasties established trade routes. This is the period where countries were made and countries were destroyed because of the importance of trade and the importance of building a fundamental, religious, and economical way of life. This paper will discuss the goals and functions of trades, and traders, and a historical analysis of world trade. This paper will also get into world trade patterns, of The Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, The Indian Ocean, The Silk routes, China and The South China Sea, Europe and The Mediterranean, and The Atlantic Exploration.

CCOT ESSAY: Analyze continuities and changes in the ways ONE of the following regions participated in interregional trade during the period circa 1500 to 1750.

The centuries from 1400 to 1700 were monumental. They marked the first time people from all across the globe were connected socially, politically, and economically. A large contributor to this were the systems of international trade, heralded by advances in maritime technology. The Columbian Exchange, for instance, transported potatoes, corn, and silver from the New World to the Old, and it carried farm animals, vegetables, and slaves from the Old World to the New. Another example is the spice trade between Asia and Europe. This trade network is simulated in an interactive learning experience entitled “Become a Spice Trader.” The purpose of this activity is to educate the participant about the nature of international trade in a fun and engaging manner. I believe that it achieves this goal.

The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods. These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country. As the volume of trade increased, the triangular trade was supplemented, but never supplanted, by a direct trade between home country and the West Indies, exchanging home manufactures directly for colonial produce.

The introduction of international trade throughout the continent provided the Americas with goods once thought unattainable. Different trade routes began to stem from the original triangle route. All of these routes had one goal; to transport the goods in high demand in the most time and cost efficient way. The different branches were trading systems between the America’s, Europe, and Africa. Through these routes, captains traded goods and services such as slaves, sugar, tobacco, cotton, textiles, and many other manufactured goods. One history changing route was the Middle Passage. The course of this route was used to transport kidnapped Africans so they could be enslaved in the Americas. Within a three hundred year period, it is

In this section I try to show how the African Slave System, after gaining a foothold went on to become the most important part of the economy of the new Nation:

We first look at the advent of slavery and the main propulsion of it. As the trade routes opened, new types of items were found and shared in new countries. Two of the most wanted and profitable crops were sugar and tobacco. In order to grow the large amounts of these crops many people were needed and in order to secure a profit, instead of paying people to work,

This enormous increase in slave trade came from the chartered companies (given trade monopolies in exchange for fees), as well as from new maritime knowledge gained by repeated travels across what became known as the “The Middle Passage”, a stretch of water between the gold and slave coasts, the region of Angola, and Brazil and the West Indies.

The Caribbean region in the late eighteenth century was exploited in many ways: plantations altering any financial potential and cruel oppressors exploiting natives and slaves to keep the “Old World” linked to the “New World.” Full of pirates, slave rebellions, and involved in multiple wars including the Nine Years’ War and the Seven Years’ War. They were home to many plays for profit, the easiest of which was smuggling. The causes and responses to smuggling were all around the same, all that matters was whom the smugglers were working for, and whose funds were being subverted by said smuggling.

Berlin stated, “More than any other single migration the Middle Passage has come to epitomize the experience of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world.” Before Africans were stolen from their country, White people were trading gold and spices until they saw the value in Black people. “The transatlantic slave trade had its beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century when Portuguese ships sailed down the West African coast. The intention was to trade for gold and spices, but the voyagers found another even more valuable commodity—human beings.” The voyagers realized that Black people could help maintain the White peoples’ plantation and the voyagers made money selling the Black people to plantation owners in North America. Berlin said, “Over time, the trade in men and women supplanted other commerce, and the slaves’ destination changed from Europe to the Americas, where plantations growing commodities for the international market initiated the massive transfer of African peoples.”

Another factor enabling the slave trade was a better nautical knowledge. An “understanding of the wind and ocean currents of the North and South Atlantics” (Eltis, 2007). Not having enough indenture servants from Europe and a dying Amerindian population made trading for African’s slaves the best choose. The “agency” that supplied the slaves were the ruling tribe of the African’s region. Slaves were either former prisoner of war or a person of criminal tendencies (Eltis, 2007).

The first subject that I would like to talk about is the Middle Passage. In 1619 Europeans start bringing africans was separated from their families and friends. They were stripped naked and put on a boat, where they would be chain to people who would die days into the trip. Some mothers would kill their kids and themselves,

Men and women carried crates of assorted wares to the center of the colony in preparation for trades. Once every four months a lone trader traversed the broken countryside risking life and limb to trade with the outlying villages. He came by horse and wagon and bartered goods difficult or impossible to find. The most valuable of his goods came without a price: news of the Lawless.