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Essay / The Atlantic slave trade and New World plantation slavery as roots of European racism in Africa, by slave traders mainly to the Americas. This essay will evaluate the following claim that "the roots of European racism lie in transatlantic trade and New World plantation slavery," through the use of different historical sources. The Atlantic slave trade that occurred throughout the 16th and 19th centuries and the modern systems of slavery established during its existence had a tremendous impact on the evolving relationship between black and white global societies. Transatlantic slavery not only conditioned the attitudes and behaviors of white slaveholders and black slaves in the New World. This further affected the nature of the development of contacts between European and African countries, thus ultimately affecting the original systematization of relations between the white and black worlds. The processes of African slavery and the New World systems of slavery into which it developed were because they were part of a growing quest for influence and power by Europe and the white world in Africa. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Reasons for the Formation of the Slave Trade As sugar plantations grew, they required large numbers of workers and hard labor, slaves coming from inland Europe or slaves imported from Africa acquired through trade with the neighboring coast of West and Central Africa. In this way, the African Atlantic islands became home to some of the earliest examples of the plantation agricultural complex and African slave labor system that would come to dominate the Atlantic world. These plantations developed from Mediterranean agricultural systems more focused on growing cash crops. trade rather than subsistence crops for local use. Europeans discovered many of their major cash crops, such as sugar, through their exposure to Muslim agriculture during the Crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries. Sugar cane was particularly attractive to Europeans because their only sweetener used to be honey. They could also use the sugar to make alcoholic drinks, such as rum or Madeira. Even then, sugarcane cultivation required access to tropical land that was not available in northern Europe, and the processing and transportation of sugar across Europe required significant labor and trade resources. Sugar also did not have the nutritional value to be a staple crop for local consumers, like wheat or rice. Instead, it was a complementary luxury product that needed to be cultivated for a broad consumer base in order to become a profitable cash crop. This initiated a demand for long-distance trade networks, as well as significant labor and land resources. For these reasons, the expansion of the European sugar market particularly fueled the rise of plantation-style agriculture, cash crop trade, and plantation slavery throughout the Atlantic world. When Europeans settled in areas of America where sugarcane could not grow, or when they had to adapt to a competitive sugar market, they discovered that they could adapt the plantation model and persuaded the structure of thelabor to capitalize on other cash crops that also had great consumer market appeal, such as tobacco, indigo, rice, and eventually cotton. Given Africa's proximity, Europeans chose not to colonize or establish plantations on the neighboring continent of West and Central Africa, but instead chose to expend valuable resources to cross the Atlantic Ocean to America. Ultimately, most of the nations and empires of West and Central Africa were militarily too strong for the vast European profession. The rulers of these African regions were often willing to trade goods and enslave Africans, and they even established military alliances with Europeans in advanced colonies, but they resisted and generally prevented further European colonization. widespread during the first stages of the expansion of the New World. immunities against many tropical diseases, which encouraged them to settle on islands or coasts rather than in the African interior. The strength of the Ottoman Empire blocked European expansion east of the Mediterranean, which also forced 15th and 16th century Europeans to look west for commercial growth and colonization. Driven by lucrative, labor-intensive projects, such as plantations and mines, Europeans transformed the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier to highways for the transportation of goods, settlers, and workers convinced. Plantation agriculture and the cash crop trade played a central role in European expansion into the New World and the development of slavery, primarily of Africans, in the Americas. Establishment of Trade In the 15th century, Portugal became the first European nation to take a significant part in the African slave trade. The Portuguese primarily acquired slaves to work on the plantations of the Atlantic African islands and then for plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, although they also sent small numbers to Europe. Initially, Portuguese explorers attempted to acquire African manpower through direct raids along the coast, but they found that these attacks were costly and often ineffective against West African military strategies and central. Just as in 1444, Portuguese marauders arrived in Senegal ready to attack and capture. The Africans used armor, swords, and ocean-going ships. But the Portuguese discovered that the Senegalese outmaneuvered them by using light, shallow boats better suited to the estuaries of the Senegalese coast. Additionally, the Senegalese fought with poisoned arrows that pierced their armor and decimated the Portuguese soldiers. Thereafter, Portuguese traders generally abandoned direct combat and established trade relations with the rulers of West and Central Africa, who agreed to sell slaves captured in various African wars or internal trade, as well as to gold and other goods, in exchange for European and North African goods. Over time, the Portuguese developed new slave trading partnerships with African rulers along the coasts of West and Central Africa and claimed a monopoly on these relationships, which initially limited access to trade for other Western European competitors. Despite Portuguese claims, African leaders applied their own local laws and customs when negotiating relationscommercial. Many favored increased trade with Europeans from other countries. When the Portuguese, and later their European competitors, discovered that peaceful trade relations alone were not enough to generate enough African slaves to meet the growing demands of the transatlantic slave trade, they formed military alliances with some. African groups against their enemies. This encouraged wider warfare to produce captives for trade. While European-backed Africans had their own political or economic reasons for fighting other African enemies, the end result for European traders in these military alliances was greater access to enslaved war captives. To a lesser extent, Europeans also pursued African colonization to secure access to slaves and other goods. For example, the Portuguese colonized parts of Angola in 1571 with the help of military alliances from the Congo, but were driven out in 1591 by their former allies. Throughout this early period, African leaders and European competitors ultimately prevented these attempts at African colonization from becoming as large as in the Americas. The Portuguese dominated the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade on the African coast in the 16th century. As a result, other European nations first gained access to African slaves through privateers during the wars with the Portuguese, rather than through direct trade. When English, Dutch, or French privateers captured Portuguese ships during maritime conflicts in the Atlantic, they often found African slaves on these ships, as well as Atlantic trade goods, and they sent these captives to work in their own colonies. In this way, the race generated commercial interest in the transatlantic slave trade in European colonies in the Americas. After Portugal's temporary union with Spain in 1580, the Spanish ended the Portuguese monopoly on the slave trade by offering direct slave trading contracts to other European merchants. Known as the asiento system, the Dutch took advantage of these contracts to compete with the Portuguese and Spanish for direct access to the African slave trade, and the British and French eventually followed. By the 18th century, when the transatlantic slave trade reached its peak, the British, followed by the French and Portuguese, had become the largest transporters of African slaves across the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority of African slaves went to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, and a smaller percentage went to North America and other parts of South and Central America. harsh conditions on slave ships. Those that arrived at various ports in the Americas were then sold at public auctions or at smaller trading venues to plantation owners, merchants, small farmers, successful traders, and other slave traders. These traders could then transport slaves several miles away to sell them on other Caribbean islands or within the interior of North or South America. Mainly European slave owners purchased African slaves to provide a workforce that included domestic services and artisanal trades. However, the majority of them provided labor and agricultural skills to produce cash crops for domestic and international markets. THESlave owners used the profits from these exports to expand their land holdings and purchase more African slaves, thus perpetuating the cycle of the transatlantic slave trade for centuries, until various European countries and new nations Americans officially ceased their participation in this trade in the 19th century through illegal transfers. The Atlantic slave trade continued even after national and colonial governments issued legal prohibitions. Racism in the New WorldThe earliest forms of racial prejudice in Western Europe began among Europeans. The ancient Greeks described “other” European groups, such as the Scythians and Celts, as barbarians and savages. They often defined their prejudices based on physical preferences for certain bodily and facial features, including lighter skin, and discouraged intermarriage. In the Middle Ages, European Christians also stigmatized the color black and associated it with sin and death. The darker skin of European workers who worked outdoors, exposed to the sun and wind, led elites to associate skin color and blackness with servitude, long before New World slavery. During subsequent divisions and conflicts across Europe, combatants continued to claim physical and mental superiority over their opponents to justify military and union subjugation. For example, during the British conquest of Ireland in the 16th century, the English monarchy characterized the Gaelic Irish as morally and physically inferior, as well as darker-skinned, compared to the civilized English population. European concepts of conquest combined religious prejudices and stereotypes of physical and mental inferiority to justify subjugation as a civilizing force. These ideologies of conquest took on a major economic focus with the expansion of the New World, when Europeans used their physical and religious differences to justify the large-scale enslavement of Africans and the displacement of American Indians for work and control of land in plantations and mines. Notably, as economic incentives for subjugation increased, European racial stereotypes of Africans became more pejorative. As historian Ira Berlin notes: With the rise of African slavery in the New World, Europeans modified these stereotypes to support a racial hierarchy in which Africans and African Americans were portrayed as bestial, servile beings. , unintelligent and sexually promiscuous. As Berlin explains, New World racism developed to justify New World slavery. Over time, this racial boundary of white superiority and the belief that Africans and American Indians were inferior races grew to influence European social, political, legal, and labor systems throughout societies. of the Atlantic world. However, the sharing of white racial privileges did not mean the end of conflict among European nations. The French and English, for example, have proven more than willing to go to war with each other on several occasions. Despite ongoing conflicts, neither nation was willing to enslave each other or their own citizens based on their previous history of competitive balance and a growing sense of white racial superiority over non-Europeans. . Enslaved Africans and American Indians consistently resisted their secondary status within this.. 2019
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