The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade And Great Awakening

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.

When the international slave trade was banned in 1808, it did not put a stop the trade of slaves. Since slaves could no longer be traded internationally, the domestic slave trade blossomed into an even larger part of America’s economy. Beforehand, when international trade was allowed, “ten to eleven million people were packed beneath the slave ship decks and sent to the New World” and “behind the numbers lie the horrors of the Middle Passage: chained slaves forced to dance themselves into shape on the decks; the closed holds, where men and women were separated from one another and chained into the space of a coffin; the stifling heat and untreated illness, the suicides and slave revolts, the dead thrown over-board as the ships passed on” Judging based on this information alone, one

“The Slave Ship: A Human History” written by Marcus Rediker describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, and captains, and ship crewmen on their journey through the Middle Passage, the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves to cultivate crops in the Caribbean and America offered a great economy for the European countries by providing “free” labor and provided immense wealth for the Europeans. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). African enslavement to the Americas is the most prominent reason for a complete shift in the

Slavery was a central institution in American society during the late eighteenth century, and was accepted as normal and applauded as a positive thing by many white Americans. In the 1770’s, there were approximately 400,000 blacks in the Southern colonies and 50,000 in the Northern colonies. Slaves were central to the operation of the colonies, especially in the South where they were a crucial element of the labour force. They were treated as inferiors, but living alongside whites, and essential as an exploited labouring class. On one hand, people were advocating liberty from slavery, while at the same time relying on slaves to drive the economy.

Slavery was a system of forced labor popular in the 17th and 18th century that exploited and oppressed blacks. Slavery was an issue in the US that brought on many complex responses. Slave labor introduced to the United States a multitude of issues that questioned political, economical, and social morals. As slave labor increased due to the booming of cottage industries with the market revolution, reactions to these issues differed between regions, creating a sectional split of the United States between industrial North and plantation South. Historiographers Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese, in their respective articles, attempt to interpret the attitudes of American slaves toward their experiences of work as well as the social and economic implications of slave labor.

When Americans today consider the term “slavery,” they recall a dark time in their nation's past, when an entire race of people were subjugated solely for the color of their skin, a travesty of civil rights that progressive thinking has striven to heal, insofar as paving the way to the election of an African-American president. Slavery is an antiquated practice from a draconian past, and it has no relevance in this modern, enlightened age. What Americans fail to comprehend is that slavery is not only alive and well, but thriving, and fueling the global economy at the expense of human lives. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency dedicated to protecting the human rights of laborers world-wide, estimates that

This country is known for two horrific acts against mankind, the inhumane treatment of the American Indians and the enslavement of African-Americans. Both groups are still affected today and this essay will look at how White Americans are still reaping benefits today. The number of slaves brought to North America, South America, and the Caribbean was off the wall as between 1619 and the end of slavery approximately 9.6 and 10.8 were forcibly brought over from Africa (Mintz, 2009). The numbers rose from 36,000 a year in the early 1700s to almost 80,000 a year during the 1780s, the peak of the tragic importation (Mintz, 2009). Most were not brought to the United States, but by 1825 the United States and a quarter of the slaves because the death rate was much higher in other areas of the Americas (Mintz, 2009). The slaves in this country were more removed from their African roots as by 1850, most of the slaves in the Caribbean were born in Africa where those in the United States had been there for several generations (Mintz, 2009). Many of their traditions and customs were taken away or forgotten. Maybe this is why it has taken African-Americans in this country longer to discover their roots than those of other areas.

There is no doubt that the United States was built upon the hard work of Black-American slaves, referred to at the time as bondpeople, who were the main labor force in producing important American exports, such as cotton or tobacco, which were, in fact, the backbone of the American economy during that time. Due to bondpeople’s overall importance in keeping the United States the powerhouse that it was, the domestic slave trade was a value market that “‘was roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital, North and South combined, invested in manufacturing, almost three times the amount invested in railroads, and seven times the amount invested in banks’”(23). In “‘In Pressing Need of Cash,’” Daina Ramey Berry, a professor for the Departments of History and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, looks at a fifteen year period, from 1850-1865, of the economic factors of the domestic slave trade. Berry uses Steven Deyle’s findings in his study, "Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life” which examined both the "long-distance interstate trade" and the extensive local or "intrastate" trade of enslaved males and females, who were priced differently depending on their perceived market value (23). With Deyle’s findings, Berry specifically discusses the relationships among gender, age, skill, or type of sale and how those factors, generally, determined the priced paid of enslaved workers.

The horrors of the New World Atlantic Slave trade system cannot be expressed in figures along. The humanitarian and cultural losses are staggering. Throughout this period, more than a million and a half died

In American history, every event and person plays a part in the future. For example, rich plantation owners helped America advance their economy. However, that would not have been at all possible without the help of their slaves. The time and institution of slavery is a time of historical remembrance. It played a primary role during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The treatment, labor conditions, and personal stories of these slaves’ treatment and labor conditions are all widely discussed around the world to this day.

Such a dramatic switch as the one from indentured servants to slaves was not the only transformation in American slavery. Slaves underwent many integral changes as the years of servitude progressed. The slave-owner relationship directly represented how times changed for slaves while working. As they were brought over to America and were in culture shock, they were often treated like absolute dirt. The inferiority of slaves is illustrated as Kolchin states that “It was easy to look upon Africans in an instrumental manner: they were “savages” imported to work, and few planters expressed much interest in their lives, except for a lively concern with training them in that work or securing their obedience (p. 59).” As time progressed however, and less slaves were directly from Africa, the ideology towards slaves changed. Kolchin writes that “Slave owners were changing too: just as the slaves were becoming America-born, so, too, were the masters (p.59).” Slave owners started to look at slaves at as people instead of objects. This was a very monumental step in slavery. Slaves began to gain more freedoms from their masters. These freedoms included religious Sundays off, family visitations, and the ability to make money on the side. While some slaves were still met with the hardships of harsh southern slave owners beating them, as time went on, slaves became more of

African civilizations lived within their own family groups. The Africans and Europeans already established trade and routes among themselves prior to the evolution of the New World. The trading of slaves started when the Europeans recognized that they Africans were beneficial in areas of trade, labor and artistic.

The aftermath of the Atlantic Slave Trade included the commercialization of African economies and the solidification of European colonization and colonialism. Describe this commercialization and its subsequent effects.

The changes in African life during the slave trade era form an important element in the economic and technological development of Africa. Although the Atlantic slave trade had a negative effect on both the economy and technology, it is important to understand that slavery was not a new concept to Africa. In fact, internal slavery existed in Africa for many years. Slaves included war captives, the kidnapped, adulterers, and other criminals and outcasts. However, the number of persons held in slavery in Africa, was very small, since no economic or social system had developed for exploiting them (Manning 97). The new system-Atlantic slave trade-became quite different from the early African slavery. The

In 1969 Philip Curtin described the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade as a “Numbers Game.” Curtin found that historians conceptualized the commodification of human beings through quantification. A year earlier in 1968, Frederick George Kay claimed in The Shameful Trade that fifty million Africans were exported into slavery in foreign lands. Twenty years later, Paul Lovejoy offered a summary of the field. He argued “that known scale of the slave trade was on the order of 11,863,000” Africans were exported into bondage. Then ten years later, in 1999, the work of David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein was published as The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. This work built upon the work of other historians who have largely dealt with the issue of the Atlantic Slave Trade by counting and quantifying human suffering. This database slowly grew and now includes documentation “on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.” This database has made it easier to quantify the Atlantic slave trade. Historians now could use the power of a computer to understand the sheer number of transportations. With the publication of this database it seemed likely that historians would continue the “numbers game” and get to the heart of the Atlantic slave trade. However, recent work on the Atlantic slave trade has gone in a different direction.