The Routes Of Slavery Assignment : The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slaves were bought and sold in many places, mostly for laboring farm land. In the Atlantic world during the 1500's and 1600’s there were many causes and effects to African slave trade. Many Europeans needed slaves to labor on their lands.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was a very important time in history. When the records of the Atlantic slave Trade are reflected upon ,the impacts of the shipboards revolts are often times overseen .Although these revolts did have an immense effect on the political, views of the Slave trade. Richardson’s “shipboard revolts,African Authority,and the Atlantic slave trade”. brings into view the fluctuating causes and effects of shore based, and shipboard insurrection . Because of Richardson occupation it grants him reliability to all of his claims and supports his opinions His profession of studying economics and international ,offers him a profusion amount of education in the countries which were involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Richardson expose the indispensable impacts of shipboard revolts , African Leadership on the Atlantic slave trade, the author accomplishes this by painting out the causes an effects of each specific revolt an also by exposing the progress.

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.

In the United States, slavery had an overwhelming impact on their political, social, and economical. Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the first African slaves were brought into the United States. Reasons were because the tobacco, sugar, rice, and coffee fields were expanding which led to increasing the demand for labor. The Atlantic slave trade was an inhuman systematic importation of slaves between the African traders, American planters, and the European merchants bargaining over human lives which led to the Middle Passage. 1675-1775, the slaves were the backbone of monoculture labor and so it was put into law to keep the Africans as slaves. “So prevalent was this Italian-operated slave trade that the word “slave” was derived from the word “Slav,” name for people from Slavic countries” (Williams 3). In both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation.

In discussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the term “Middle Passage” often arises. The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic Slave trade. The journey was one of the most horrific aspects of the morally deplorable system of slavery. Death was a constant threat as diseases, starvation, asphyxiation and severe depression rampantly claimed the lives of African and the ship’s crew. Throughout this essay you will understand the tragic journey of the slaves and what hardships they had to go through.

The transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, after the Portuguese started exploring the coast of West Africa. This had a long term effect on Africa because even though it started out benefiting the upper class in Africa, the long term effect was devastating. When Europeans started to enter Africa, they enjoyed “the triple advantage of guns and other technology, widespread literacy, and the political organization necessary to sustain expensive programs of exploration and conquest”(Doc 4). Africa’s relations with Europe depended on common interests, which Europe did not share. Europe’s contact with Africa, involving economic exchanges and political relationships, was not mutually beneficial.

The two majors drivers that led to the transatlantic slave trade was the European desire for the agricultural products of the Americas and the need for laborers to work the land in the Americas. All participants, besides for the slaves, benefited from the trading.

The transatlantic slave trade first began in 1502, with records of the first slaves in the New World, lasting nearly four centuries. It connected the economies of three continents. The route began in West Europe, where it continued to Africa, trading manufactured goods such as rum, textiles, weapons, and gunpowder for slaves. From Africa, the ship went along the Atlantic to America, distributing slaves, and bringing agricultural products such as coffee, cotton, rice, and sugar back to Europe. The entire route typically lasted eighteen months. The slave trade ended in 1867, seventeen years after Britain began arresting slave ships.

Slavery in the American colonies had greatly shaped the nation as we know it to be today. After the discovery of the New World, Spanish conquerors intended to enslave Native Americans, but punishment, overwork, and diseases such as small pox and malaria decreased their population rapidly. The only solution was to kidnap African Americans from their homeland and transport them on ships under poor, unsanitary conditions, many of which died of yellow fever, dysentery, or suicide. Upon arrival, they were fed and oiled to make them more physically attractive so they can be purchased by wealthy landowners who forced them into labor. Here, plantation owners assigned task for each individual slave, working long hours in the field harvesting crops. At first, these African Americans held the status of indentured servitude, but as the demand for labor grew increasingly, treatment became much harsher. Additionally, African Americans were outnumbering plantation owners, and as a result, they were stripped of their freedom in fear of revolts. Although slaves have little to no rights, they played an important role in developing the economy despite experiencing racial discrimination.

Slavery has been a big part of American history ever since the first slave trade back in 1526, when many Africans set sale to the ‘New World’ from Europe.The reason why Americans looked to purchase slaves is also stated by some historians, “...the Americas looked to Africa as the preferred source of labor because slaves could be procured so cheaply here” (Inikori and Engerman, 30.) After realizing their benefits, they began to ship in more and more slaves from Africa. This was known as the Transatlantic slave trade and it lasted all the way from 1526 to 1867. During this time about a total of 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa in all parts of the

The Atlantic Slave Trade was a system of slavery that took place between the 16th and 19th centuries. It comprised of capturing African tribesmen and women from areas of Western and Central Africa and placing them into the colonies of the New World in North, Central, and South America. Many countries like England, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and France, had participated in enslaving the African peoples. The African slaves were used to exploit an array of commodities such coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco, and eventually they had become commodities themselves. Often times the slaves were treated awfully by their owners. Most were forced to work long and tiresome hours on plantations to acquire said commodities, and then use them to create products that would be later sold. The slaves did not receive any profits from the sale of the products that they produced, but they were paid with basic needs such as shelter and food. The revenue that was produced by slave labour was highly profitable, but in turn it was counter acted by the cost of keeping the slave labourers alive and well. By the end of the 18th century a period known as the Industrial Revolution had swept Europe, especially England, and her colonial partners. Never before had production been so cheap and efficient. Many believe that the enslavement of Africans was necessary to initiate the industrial revolution. They believe that the slaves provided the foundation to the development of the revolution, and without

Imagine yourself looking at the world in fear and no understanding of hardships. Everyday,slaves had felt those feelings as if they were unwanted or were worthless. Since the time of slavery, slaves faced multiple challenges such as splitting families up for hard labor,having miniable food, and fighting against the eye of death. To begin,people had been forced to leave their families in Africa to become slaves.During the time period of the 1800’s, in order to have slaves,people from ether America, Europe, and many more would send out ships to capture the people in African.Once heading back they bored about 12.5 million Africans and only about 10 million survived. Most slaves were no able to handle the intense boat ride. Additionally, slaves

African American Slavery began during the 1600s where Europeans first used Africans as their laborers and moved the Africans to the new settlement in the colonies. Though it seemed unlawful and unconstitutional at the time it served very well to the economy, especially to the southern colonies which mass-produced cash crops such as tobacco and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia by the early 1700’s.

Somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas. Europeans would ship Africans to the Americas to make a profit and about 15% of them would die on the way to the Americas. The others who did survive would become “property” and bought and sold like animals. They would be sold to plantations to do work so that Europeans could make money and most of them knowing that they would never see their family together ever again. The leading cause of slavery from 1451-1870 was that Europe profited from the exploitation of the Africans which were used as slaves in the Americas in order to produce cheap materials for Europe.

The institution of slavery in the United States of America was a process that evolved over generations; an institution which developed in the northern colonies of New England area very differently than the Southern colonies. In the South, slavery as an institution started to enhance the productivity of agriculture. It may not have been the most humane way to grow cotton or sugar cane, but slavery provided essentially “free” labor to white farmers: “The settlers in the Southern States were naturally tempted by the example of the West Indian planters, to make use of these imported black[s] in the service of field labor” ("Slaves and Slavery"). African people were kidnapped from their home, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, and sold as property in order to do manual labor for white people. Many today are ashamed that the U.S. went through such a cruel period of history when we subjected millions to the atrocities of the slave trade. The result of the 1860 census states that almost 13% of the population was slaves, or four million slaves in a country of only 31 million people (US Census Bureau). But during