Assignment 2- Atlantic Economies

            “For several millennia, servitude was an important element of life in societies bordering the Mediterranean underpinning successively the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Empires.” (Richardson 564) At the time of the New World discovery, the practice of slavery was already in place and these ideas would fuel the need for cheap labor in the new plantation economies of the Americas.

            What happened between 1500 and 1800 with the explosion of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Southern American economies as well as the need for slaves in the North American colonies, was a rapid influx of involuntary movement of African people to the Americas, so large that it is often times referred to as the black holocaust. The need for slave labor for sugar plantations rose dramatically. In this passage, “Captive Africans also toiled in mining activities and, in time, in other forms of agricultural activity in the Americas, notably coffee, cotton, rice, and tobacco cultivation. But it was sugar that consumed the time of most enslaved Africans in the Americas and that dictated their life chances in captivity.” (Richardson 572) here Richardson points out the human cost of the New World and sugars dwarfing needs. It’s important also to note that this is on top of slaves still being used in the Old World therefore the demand for slaves grew rapidly in a very short time over a much broader area than in the past.

            The population of the indigenous peoples of the Americas suffered at the hands of new diseases brought from the Old World. With possible labor resources being depleted, the slave trade offered the sugar plantations the population replacements needed to operate and expand sugar production as demand was constantly growing for the sweet stuff back in Europe. Richardson shows that an estimated eighty percent of the slaves being brought here were placed on the sugar plantations. (Richardson 580) If they even made it to the cane fields after the long and harrowing trek, Africans entering into the sugar plantations found the work here hard and demanding, living conditions were horrific and there was not much attention given to repopulating the workforce. Replacement demand became a substantial factor, they would simply continue to buy more, inflating further, the need for more human trafficking. 

            The introduction of sugar plantations in the Americas did not start slavery by any means, but its aftermath did fuel the astronomical numbers of forced migrations that followed over the course of a little more than three centuries.

References:

David Richardson, “Involuntary Migration in the Early Modern World,” The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol.3, pp.563-593