The Renaissance, beginning in the fourteenth century, was a period in European history that marked a change from the Middle Ages to the development of the modern world. Because of the Renaissance, there was an increase in the interests of exploration, innovation and experimentation. It was because of many new innovations in navigation and seafaring technology that allowed Europeans to explore and colonize the New World. There was competition between European countries over resources in the New World. However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Great Britain had become the most powerful European nation because of its navy as well as its booming economy, enhanced by its colonies. The Spanish and the Portuguese dominated exploration and …show more content…
Initially, the primary source of labor was indentured servants from England. The indentured servants usually signed contracts to work for three to five years under their employer. When their contracts were up, the indentured servants received a patch of land. However, the conditions for indentured servants worsened as the Virginia colony developed. New indentured servants were forced to work longer contracts (seven years) because there was not enough land available for the growing population. The issues of the indentured servants erupted during Bacon’s Rebellion in …show more content…
The British established a colony in Barbados in 1627, where they began large scale sugar production. The sugar revolution in the British Caribbean created a demand for a large amount of laborer. Slaves were the laborers used to perform this work. Millions of slaves were brought to the New World during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Initially, the majority of the salves were destined for the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations. The slaves that work on sugar plantations had hard physically demanding jobs, which resulted in short life spans. Additionally, many slaves died from the numerous diseases present in the Caribbean. Because of the brutality of slavery and short life spans in the Caribbean, new slaves had to be constantly imported. The sugar plantation system was set up in a way to maximize profit. This involved dedicating all available farmland to producing and refining sugar. Caribbean planters did not even grow their own food, so they had to import it from the colonies in North America, primarily South
Slave labor is the final factor that drove the sugar trade and made it so successful. Slaves were the manual laborers on the plantations, doing the actual harvesting and boiling because the owner wasn’t there to do so (Document 8). Without the slaves working the farm, everything was pretty much useless. There is also a direct correlation between the number of slaves and the tons of sugar produced. This is shown in Document 9, where the island of Jamaica starts out with 45,000 slaves, and produces 4,782 tons of sugar. When the number of slaves increases by less than half to 74,500, the amount of sugar produced is more than tripled at 15, 972 tons. This clearly exhibits how slaves were essential to sugar
By the 18th century, Pennsylvania was becoming home for American Development. Many people that were drawn to Pennsylvania were servants whether, for sometimes 4 years or however long, it took to pay off debt for their travel across the Atlantic. If they weren’t servant, they were slaves who almost had no chance of freedom. Servants had a chance to become free after paying off their debts with work, but not the same for slaves.
During the 1600’s people began to look for different types of work in the new world. As cash crops, such as tobacco, indigo, and rice, were growing in the South, there became a need for labor. This got the attention of convicts, debtors, and other people looking for new opportunities and money. Indentured servitude was vastly growing during the 17th and 18th centuries. Approximatively 10 million men, women, and children were moved to the new world. Women during this time found themselves being sold to men for these cash crops. A commonly used term during this time for these women was tobacco brides. Almost 7.7 million of the slaves captured and moved to the new world were African Americans. Slaves and indentured servants had it rough for
Physical abuse by plantation owners towards both their servants and slaves was common. One account by Thomas Gates in a General Court of Colonial Virginia document about Elizabeth Abbot, an indentured servant, stated that “she had been sore beaten and her body full of sores and holes very dangerously raunckled and putrified both above her wast and uppon her hips and thighs” (General Court of Colonial Virginia). In fact, such abuse towards servants and slaves was so common that the state of Virginia had to make laws for such cases. Unfortunately, colonial governments did not consider corporal punishment illegal. Thus adding to the brutality endured by persons in captivity and servitude during the colonial era. “Moderate corporal punishment inflicted
During the 17th and early 18th century, slavery in the United States grew from being a small addition to the labor force to a huge institution that would persist for more than a century. Much of the development of slavery occurred in the Middle and Southern colonies, especially Virginia. Without the events that occurred and the policies established in Virginia during this time period, slavery would never have become what it did today. The decrease in indentured labor coming from England led to an increase in slave labor in the colonies, and the introductions of the concepts of hereditary slavery and chattel slavery transformed slavery into the binding institution it became in the 18th century. From 1607 to 1750, Virginia saw the emergence
During American colonization, the economy of the south became predominantly dependent on the tobacco plant. As the south continued to develop, they shifted their focus to cotton. Indentured servants as well as African slaves were used for these labor-intensive crops because their labor was decent and cheap (Shi and Tindall 39). Young British men were promised a life of freedom in America if they agreed to an exchange between a free voyage and labor for a fixed number of years. Many willing, able-bodied, and young men signed up with the hopes of establishing a bright future for themselves in America. Unbeknownst to them, indentured servitude was not as easy as it was made out to be. Many servants endured far worse experiences than they had ever imagined. The physical and emotional conditions they faced were horrible, their masters overworked them, and many had to do unprofessional work instead of work that enabled them to use their own personal skills. Young British men felt that because they faced such horrible circumstances, the exchange between a free voyage to America in exchange for servitude was not a proper trade.
The role of an indentured servant in the 1700s was not a glamorous one. They came to the New World knowing that, for a time, they would be slaves for someone they did not know and the risk of disease and death was high, but the opportunity that laid ahead of them after their time of servitude was worth everything to these settlers of the New World. They came to America for the same reasons as all of the other settlers. Religious freedom, land, wealth, and a new start were motives for both settlers and indentured servants but the one thing separating most settlers from the indentured servants was that they could afford their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Indentured servants couldn’t buy their ticket to the New World, but that didn’t stop
Indentured servitude was the institutional arrangement devised to increase labor mobility from Europe (particularly England) to America, and it was the labor system that preceded American slavery. Its emergence in Virginia in the seventeenth century can be seen as a development expedient to the circumstances surrounding the colony. Indentured servitude was practically the only way in which a poor person could get to the colonies and planters could be supplied with cheap labor. Richard Frethorne's document written in 1623, The Experiences of an Indentured Servant, legalized the master-servant relationship, specified the kind of labor to be performed, the length of time to be served, and the dues owed to the servant at the completion of his term.
Despite being held at the bottom of the social pyramid for throughout colonial times, the labor of the colonies would prove to be far from useless. While vast, open land was turned into numerous plantations in the colonies by rich planters, the plantations could not purely be run by their owners, creating a great need for labor. This lack of labor would eventually be solved through the use of African slaves, but after the first shipment of slaves to Jamestown in 1619, few were purchased due to high prices for an extended amount of time. The planters, however, would be able to fulfill their need for labor through English indentured servants. Through the use of indentured servants, basically free labor was provided to land owners, while when freed, the servants would receive “freedom dues” which would help them become relevant parts of societies. Some of these freed indentured servants would then hire their own servants, creating a cycle of servants in the colonial economy. Later, indentured servants would give way to African slaves as the most efficient form of labor, a change that would revolutionize the colonies. While the use of indentured servants helped stimulate the colonial economy throughout the 1600s through labor and addition of new landowners, African slaves would be the thriving labor force in the economy in the 1700s, up to and through the American Revolution.
The typical life of an indentured servant was not a convenient one. Their journeys to the Americas were miserable. The servants were packed into large ships carrying thousands of people as well as, tools, food, etc. Not only were the people densely packed, there were various diseases flooding the ships, and many people would die from them. “I witnessed . . .
If you had money you could get land if you had land you could get slaves, if you had slaves you could get sugar & if you had sugar you could get money. If you wanted to grow sugar you needed a lot of land and good hot and humid climate for growing sugar. Everyone started to move to the West Indies to get sugar and money. Lastly Consumer Demand was a huge factor that drove The Sugar Trade.
In North America in the 17th century, slaves were imported from Africa in order to mass produce tobacco, a popular plant throughout the world, most commonly found in the Americas. Like in Mexico, these slaves working in tobacco plantations were purchased solely due to the fact that they were cheap and easily replaceable, not requiring a monthly
The Slave Revolution in the Caribbean Colonists in the eighteenth century created plantations that produced goods such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and more importantly, sugar. These plantations required forced labor, and thus slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world. “The Caribbean was a major plantation that was a big source of Europe’s sugar, and increasing economic expansion. The French had many colonies, including its most prized possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti). ”
Indentured Servants Brenden Bowman CSU Global Campus. Introduction: At the point when reading material talk about colonial labor rehearses, they frequently relate the idea of labor with male work done outside the physical limits of the home in fields; on docks; in stockrooms; on boats. Labor is connected with making products for the business sector, permitting men to take an interest in the triangle exchange, a system of exchange connections in which crude materials spilled out of the Americas to Europe, fabricated merchandise moved from Europe to "Africa" and oppressed Africans were delivered back to the "Americas".
The Renaissance, which began in Italy in the 1300s, was one of the largest periods of growth and development in Western Europe. Navigation was no longer limited to traveling about by land. Large fleets of ships were constructed, and great navigational schools, the best founded by Prince Henry the Navigator in Portugal, were founded. People were no longer tied to the lands they lived on, as they were in medieval times. They were freer to learn new skills and travel. These enabled people to go further than they had before. Fleets of ships were sent to the Eastern world to bring back treasures and valuable spices. Routes to Asia were traveled beginning in the early Renaissance.