Many people around the world believe that slavery was only held in North America with Africans being the only type to face punishment. This widely spread stereotype is actually false. The Caribbean and West Africa were large affected by the transatlantic slave trade in 1450 to1750. While wrong and immoral, the slavery in both places have similarities and differences. The Caribbean was one of the worst slave trading operations in the world. European ships sailed from Africa, where they picked up slaves, to the Caribbean. The slaves who were to weak to travel to the US or were proved to cause trouble, were dropped off in the Caribbean. Once there, the slaves harshly worked the sugar cane and tobacco plantations. This sudden flux of black slaves in the Caribbean changed the population greatly. According to Jerome Handler of the International Slavery Museum, “By the early 18th century when sugar production was fully established, nearly 80% of the population was African.” This population change affected the conditions of the slaves because the owners feared rebellion. The Africans in ...
“Why were the countries with the most developed institutions of individual freedom also the leaders in establishing the most exploitive system the world has ever seen?” The book, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, written by David Eltis, seeks many different types of answers for this question and reviews the actions of slavery, exploring all of the issues that best describe the three decades of progress in the study of the Atlantic Slave Trade and in American slavery. Slavery was an accepted term in human society for many years and Eltis wanted to figure out why bigger and wealthier countries were creating these exploitive systems in the world. He unites the African, European, and American markets with their similar transportation expenses of
The majority of the nearly 500,000 slaves on the island, at the end of the eighteenth century endured some of the worst slave conditions in the Caribbean. These people were seen as disposable economic inputs in a colony driven by greed. Thus, they receive...
The National Archives | Exhibitions & Learning online | Black presence | Africa and the Caribbean. (n.d.). Retrieved March 18, 2014, from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/africa_trade.htm
Jamaica’s history is full of social unrest. The island was originally inhabited by the Arawaks. The Arawaks were a peaceful, pleasant race. In his History of the British West Indies, Sir Alan Burns says, "all accounts credit them with being generous-minded, affectionate and good-humoured" (37). Once Jamaica was "discovered" by Spain in 1494, however, the Arawaks, who had inhabited the island for centuries, quickly died off due to the harsh treatment of the Spaniards. Spain never really developed the land, however, and thus when British forces invaded in 1655, Spain chose not to focus much energy on defending the island.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was one of, if not the largest scale movements of human beings from one part of the world to another by sea and could have been considered a mobile killing machine because of the horrible conditions. The numbers were so large that the slaves who came by slave trade were the most Old-World immigrants in the world. Even though there were only races of people enslaved during the Atlantic Slave Trade, African Americans were the most numerous. Records show 34,941 voyages during the time of the slave trade. The Transatlantic Slave Trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean in the 16th century and lasted till the 19th centuries. The way that the Atlantic Slave Trade came about was cruel but not unthinkable. The capture and enslavement of African Americans was inevitable, the only question was when. A lot more slaves were taken to the South America than to the North America because the South “needed” them more. The South Atlantic economic system was based on producing crops, making goods and other things to sell. The enslaved people didn’t just skip into the ship with smiles on their faces. The Spanish colonists asked the King of Spain for permission to bring slaves to The New World to provide for them. Spanish Colonists were currently forcing Native Americans to do their labor for them but they were dying in large numbers because of diseases and lack of care from the colonists. The King of Spain gave approval to the colonists to import Africans and from then on Africans were transported there for use and labor and other needs of the Spanish colonists. During this time many African American slaves were transported. An estimated twelve to fifteen million African Americans were shipped throughout the world includ...
More specifically, African peoples were in no shortage of supplying the much-needed labor to the Caribbean islands. Documents 6 and 8 highlight the extent to which such plantations were labor-intensive. Namely, a 500 acre plantation in 1755 required 300 slaves to tend to the land (Doc 6), and depictions of such plantations are filled with Africans performing labor such as planting sugarcane “setts” or running cane juice through a boiling gutter (Doc 8). It thus seems to follow that African slaves would become increasing implemented into the sugar producing business. Indeed, in order to keep pace with the booming demand for additional labor, the labor supply continued to grow: in Jamaica, the slave population rose by more than 200,000 individuals between 1703 and 1789 (Doc 10). In short, slavery played an enormous role in ensuring sugar could continue to be supplied to
Every year, more and more money is donated to Africa to promote democracy in order to get rid of the powerful coups in many countries through out the continent. While the coups are declining and democratic governments are being established, the economic growth and development of Africa is not anywhere it should be considering the abundant natural resources and coastline that the continent possesses. Even though countries, like the United States of America, donate millions of dollars they are a large reason why Africa is underdeveloped economically. The Trans-Atlantic Slave trade is the most devastating event in the history of the world. Nearly 14,000,000 men, women, and children were displaced, sold into slavery, and killed by the trade routes.(
Slavery has been used throughout history but the African slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is the most brutish known to history. It was unique in three major ways. The amount of slaves being traded was tremendous. More than eleven million African slaves were “shipped” to the New World between 1519 and 1867. Of these eleven million, only 9.5 million reached the sure because of disease and extremely poor traveling accommodations.
African slaves were brought to the America’s by the millions in the 17th and 18th century. The Spanish and British established lucrative slave trades within Africa and populated their new territories with captured and then enslaved Africans. The British brought the slaves to their new colonies in North America to work on the large plantations and the Spanish and Portuguese brought the slaves to South America. Slavery within North and South America had many commonalities yet at the same time differences between the two institutions.
supervised by blacks who directed the Indians in the arduous task of extracting the precious
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 prize possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti).” Life on the plantations of Saint- Domingue was very brutal and most of the salves who survived the journey to the New World died within a few years of their arrival (Slave Revolution 7). This brutal force used on the slaves caused the slaves to rebel. This revolution, which took place in Haiti, was not only surrounded by political, economic, and racial issues, but it was also the reason for the formation of the Haitian Republic.
When slavery was abandoned throughout the Caribbean in mid-nineteenth century, the economic and political structure that controlled the island remained. The exslaves were forced to work below the minimum wages. Large number of Caribbean emigrated hoping to find better economical opportunities. In order to replace the missing number of workers, many Asian immigrants were brought to Caribbean. This resulted i...
Caribbean Slavery gave planters and elite in the Caribbean the right to abuse a human by requiring ridiculously long hours of work on the fields and not providing enough nutrition. The article by Kiple and Kiple reviews the state of malnutrition among the slaves and the findings are atrocious. Slaves were lacking basic nutrients such as calcium, fats, and various vitamins. Kiple and Kiple, regardless of these facts, state that according to 18 and 19th century standards, these diets were not poor. Unfortunately I do not think in making this statement, the authors took into account that the standard person was not a slave. Slaves were subjected to physically rigorous work, which uses a substantial amount of calories, so the standard diet would not be fit for a slave, who needs a lot more calories and nutrients to remain healthy under the situation of slavery.
The incredible history of the Caribbean is indeed, one of the most rich, and at the same time troubling, of the New World. Its incredibly heterogeneous population and its social racial base make it a very difficult place to, for instance, live and raise a family.
In order for us to understand the Caribbean, we must acknowledge the tremendous social impact slavery placed upon the islands. We must not only consider the practice of slavery dating back to the indigenous peoples, but from what the introduction of the African slave trade did to the islands economically as well as culturally. In this paper let me reflect on slavery in the Caribbean not from an economical standpoint but, from the racial or what Knight calls ‘complextional mutations’ its social impact on society.