SLAVE TRADE

Slave Trade

Slave Trade

Introduction

Slavery was a fundamental social and economic institution during Britain formative centuries and remains an underlying factor in the country's social, economic, and cultural history. That British slavery was based on race—only persons of African descent were enslaved—mean that the institution was all-important in setting the course of Britain race relations. Slavery did not begin with the seventeenth-century American colonists, but goes back to antiquity. The legal status of chattel slavery (men and women as someone's property) dates to before 2000 bc; in Mesopotamia. Trading of slaves and warfare associated with capturing prisoners to be used as slaves, existed within most slave societies. When Europeans developed sugar plantations in the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth century, planters there bought humans from wherever they were available—Slavic Russia (hence the term slave), the Levant, or black Africa; when sugar production expanded to islands off Africa's Atlantic coast in the fifteenth century, slaves came from nearby African societies; and when plantation agriculture caught on in the New World late in the sixteenth century, European planters continued to seek bonded laborers who would work best for the most reasonable price.

For reasons including immunities to a variety of diseases and difficulties in capturing and holding local peoples, those native to the Americas did not fit this bill. But Africans did. By the seventeenth century, a transatlantic slave trade was supplying Africans to plantations in Brazil and the West Indies. Men and women of African descent were the primary agricultural laborers of a vast and growing, staple-producing, Atlantic economic system. It was in this context that English adventurers settled along the James River in Virginia in 1607, looking for ways to turn a profit. It is not surprising that they tried agriculture—at first growing tobacco rather than sugar—nor that English settlers purchased slaves from Africa just a dozen years following their arrival. Others along the Atlantic side of the New World were doing the same thing (Walvin 2001, Pp. 315-344).

Discussion

Slave Trade

The slave trade took place in the middle of the 17th century, which operated in a transatlantic trading pattern. The slave trade involved trading ships departed from Europe that carried goods produced in the country and arrived at the west coast of Africa. Once the cargo arrived, the African traders would exchange young and healthy African slaves to the European traders for the manufactured goods. This exchange of goods for slaves continued for weeks and in some cases more than months. It was easy for the traders from Europe to perform business activities involving African traders. The intermediaries used to raid remote places, far away from the coast, where the Africans resided. They captured young and healthy Africans to sell them into slavery to the Europeans (Finkelman 1989, Pp. 119-131).

After the successful trade with the African traders, the ships became full and ready to be departed. The trade ships would leave for Americas or the Caribbean Once full, the European trader's ship would depart for the Americas or the Caribbean on voyage ...