Similarities Between North And South America

While slaves have existed far back into the recesses of human history and the birth of civilization, systematic slave societies are a much more modern invention. This invention has its roots largely in the slave trade in which Portugal bought and sold African slaves from West Africa to a plethora of locations, most notably North and South America. These slaves would go on to form their own individualized communities within their bondage and shape the very countries that had enslaved them in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slaves in North and South America played similar roles but developed independently of each other and thus shaped their own individual social, economic, and political advances. African Slaves living in North and South America
To start, Africans had very diverse and unique cultures in West Africa that differed from each other in many ways. Language was also varied depending on what part of the region you were from, but these differences mattered very little for the slavers and traders that simply referred to all of them in the same manner as Africans. This generalization, however persisted as Africans were enslaved and taken from their own individual communities and then clumped together into random groups depending on who bought them at the market. The national identity of Africans didn’t yet exist and instead they related back to their own tribes and customs. Nonetheless, common languages were spoken among many of them especially that of the Niger-Kongo, which allowed them to communicate and begin to form new bonds outside of their homeland. Communities began to form and one of the key aspects of these communities was their religion. Africans believed in polytheistic religions with an element of object worship present. Fortunately though the Gods of Agriculture and Fertility were shared among all religious sects thus allowing them to practice alongside each other. These churches were often run in secret in North America and sometimes fused the
Initially, Colonists from North and South America attempted to use the natives as slaves to work the land but this was often unreliable. This is due largely to the rapid small pox outbreaks that decimated the natives who didn’t possess the immunity that the Europeans did. Naturally, slaves were considered economic property in themselves but different slaves were taught and sometimes relied on skills from homeland. For example, Africans were used as miners in Brazil to mine gold and other precious metals because of their experience working in mines back in Africa. Another example in North America is the craft of metalworking which enabled slaves to become blacksmiths if they had the skills to be. In comparison, South America imported a lot more slaves in the slave trade at 5.7 Million slaves accumulated over its existence compared to North America’s 560,000. This can be explained by the larger amount of farmable land in Latin America as well as a heavier reliance on agriculture in their economy. The northern states in the United States supplemented there poor farmland for various industries such as textile and ship building to support their economy whereas the south was much more rural and depended on agriculture supported by slaves. In North America, slaves typically worked on rural plantations such as Tobacco