The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The African Slave Trade was a massive system of Europeans taking African Americans and selling them into slavery. The African Slave Trade began in the 15th century. This slave trade put Africa in a weird relationship with Europe that cause the depopulation of Africa, but it increased the wealth of Europe.

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.

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.

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 phenomenon of new world slavery was a well-run business and the slaves were the product. Slavery was one of the few industries in history where assets exceeded liability and owner’s equity, which is an unusual occurrence considering the equation is normally that assets equal liability and owner’s equity. Throughout this essay, the rise of slavery and the slave trade will be explained and slavery will be illustrated as the product of a domino effect. Slavery was a process and it took many people and pieces to fall into place for it to become the most profitable industry in its day, progressing over a 400-year time span. The economic analysis in this paper will show that the ideology of slavery in the new world came after the economic incentive.

The Transatlantic slave trade was a horrific event where between 1526 to 1867 over twelve million slaves were captured and were sent from their native homes in Africa to the Americas. The African slaves that were captured over those centuries were shipped in bulk (between 30,000 a year in the late seventeenth century and 85,000 one hundred years later). Approximately, six percent of the African slaves were taken to North America in the eighteenth century and the majority of enslaved Africans were sent South America and parts of what is now Central America. In the Southern states of America, a single slave owner owned and housed about a thousand slaves. The slave population in the United States grew and this mainly due to the high fertility rate. However, due to the living environment many of the enslaved infants had a high mortality rate did not make it past their first year of life. This was the result of the children being fed food that lacked the nutrients they needed and they were breastfed too early. Due to the unhealthy environment, slaves contracted many terrible illnesses and diseases (i.e. blindness, skin lesions, Vitamin D deficiency, Diarrhea, whooping cough, etc.) that they usually succumbed to without a way to get proper treatment for them. In the mid-nineteenth century, the population of enslaved Blacks tripled from the beginning of the nineteenth

My ancestors, along with many other African Americans living in society today are decedents of African slaves. I can remember as far back as age 5 listening to the elders in my family talk about slavery. The word slavery originated when millions of African men and women were forcible taken from their families and the familiar surroundings of their African villages. Brought here to an unfamiliar environment and forced to work on plantations in different parts of the United States, usually from sun up to sun down. the transatlantic slave trade formally began in 1518, when King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct importation of Africans to his colonies in the America. The transatlantic slave trade became a lucrative international

Talking about southern expansionism would not be complete without the mention of the interstate slave trade. This is most applicable when we talk about one aspect of the slave trade that often gets overlooked, the Atlantic Slave Trade. When mentioning the Atlantic Slave Trade, it is the fact that southerners considered reopening the trade after its dissolution in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, there were movements by southerners to reopen the Atlantic Slave Trade that were in the name of southern expansion. One such individual was a man by the name of Leonidas Spratt, a young South Carolinian editor who bought the Charleston Southern Standard and turned it into a mouthpiece for promoting the issue of reopening the Atlantic Slave Trade (Deyle 78-79). One of the many arguments individuals like Spratt used was that reopening the trade would enhance the political power of the south by adding more population, thus adding more slave states. This is central to the idea of this essay, as the growth of cotton was not entirely responsible for instigating expansion. Likewise, Spratt also argued that reopening the trade “strengthen[ed] the southern economy by lowering the costs of production and increasing the profits” (Deyle 79). While not explicitly mentioning cotton, the same idea of expansion stands in its place. Individuals like Spratt were eventually unsuccessful in reopening the trade due to a minimal amount of support, but it goes to show how even

Religious institutions have played a prominent role in the history of American culture, and legislation. These institutions were especially impactful during the start of American colonization. Colonization caused the aggregated need for mass amounts of workers for cultivation infrastructure. For this reason, American settlers began the transatlantic slave trade trade. Christianity played an important role in advocating for the morality of the slave trade (Richard). In order to drive the slave industry, pastors across America used the traditions and stories found in the Bible to endorse and even encourage the practice of slavery. At this time, America was seeing ever dividing sects of protestantism. There were countless institutions

Around the mid-fifteenth century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade began. When the Portuguese moved away from their interests of selling gold, they turned to an asset that would gain them more money, slaves. By the seventeenth century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was fully established, and hit its milestone by the end of the eighteenth century. There were three stages to the Trans-Atlantic TradeStage, every stage played a role in a journey that was cost-effective for merchants. “As a commercial and economic enterprise, the slave trade provides a dramatic example of the consequences resulting from particular intersections of history and geography. It involved several regions and continents: Africa, America, the Caribbean, Europe and the Indian

The history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is more readily accessible and popular, as opposed to the history of the Viking slavers. Painter points out that the Vikings were hardly viewed in popular culture as the preeminent slavers they really were, while Dublin was the slave market capitol of the world from the 11th through the 15th centuries. Whites living in the current day British Isles through France and Scandinavia were all subject to slave raids by Vikings for hundreds of years with some destitute individuals going as far as to sell themselves into slavery. While the Atlantic Slave Trade used racism to justify their exploitation, it is important to realize that this is a justification birthed out of economic greed rather then inherit racist sentiment. Economic advancement was the purpose of the slave trade while race creation and whiteness were constructs built to support and justify this economic exploitation during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Unfortunately, due the indoctrinated justifications of race creation; racism, prejudice and the prevalence of whiteness became magnified and held up as superior social standing.

The slave trade within the Atlantic World took place amongst the Atlantic Ocean beginning in the fifteenth century. The majority of the individuals whom became part of the slave trade were moved about on the triangular trade route to the New World. The Portuguese empire in 1418 was the first to conform into the idea of the New World slave trade. In 1440 Columbus’s discovery of the Americas created a new Atlantic zone of human contact and communication that embraced four continents and one ocean” (Reilly,563). In 1562 the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas was conquered, which started a trend for other countries to follow. The Atlantic slave

Once individuals think of trade they usually visualize the exchanging of goods or services for a profit. However, during the seventeenth to nineteenth century, the idea of “trade” seem to have an altered definition. Millions of women, men and children were forced out of their African homelands and transported across the Atlantic to be sold as labors and work under horrific conditions. The Transatlantic slave trade sometimes known as the Triangular slave trade because of its three-sided based voyages from Europe to Africa, Africa to North America, and North America back to Europe. The transatlantic slave trade said to be the biggest form of deportation in history. It transported the estimation of ten to fifteen million Africans over the Atlantic