Chapter 26 Essay
From 1450 - 1750, the development of the Atlantic trade impacted participating civilizations by increasing interactions between slaves and Europeans as seen in documents 3, 4, 7, 5, and 8. An increase of good distributed around the world causing an economic boom shown in 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 6, artificially where the moneyed interest of Europeans affected the way their lives were portrayed to the world from documents 2 and 9. Additional documents to improve the given information would be a list of a plantation owner’s sales that shows the agricultural output of slaves were bought, sold, and killed.
The Portuguese brought a few slaves home from Africa, but found that they were impractical for use in Europe with its small, family-based farms and town life. However, it soon was clear how slavery could be readily adopted in the Americas. Like the overwhelming majority of preindustrial societies, African kingdoms practiced slavery, and when Europeans offered to trade their goods for slaves, African traders accommodated them. As a general rule, African slave hunters would capture Africans, generally from other groups than their own, and transport them to trading posts along the coast for European ships to carry to the New World. However, despite the fact that slavery already existed in Africa, the Atlantic trade interacted with and transformed these earlier aspects of slavery. Before the Atlantic slave trade began, slavery took many forms in Africa, ranging from peasants trying to work off debts to those that were treated as "chattel," or property. The Atlantic trade emphasized the latter, and profits from the trade allowed slaveholders both in Africa and the Americas to intensify the level of exploitation of labor. African slaves were traded to two areas of the world: the Western Hemisphere and Islamic lands in the Middle East and India. Fewer slaves crossed the Sahara than the Atlantic, but the numbers were substantial. Whereas most slaves that