4.1: The Beginnings of African Slavery

• Because war and disease had devastated the Indian population, colonists imported African slaves as workers.

• In the sixteenth century, the West African coast, from Cape Verde south to Angola, lived more than 100 different peoples.

• Agriculture has sustained large populations and flourishing trade networks and developed kingdoms and states in some areas

4.2: The African Slave Trade

• The slave trade in the Atlantic started with the Portuguese people in the fifteenth century but only ended in the US by 1808.

• Men usually outnumbered women two to one among Africans who were transported to America.

  • This ratio was probably the reflection of plantation masters' preferences who wanted field workers.

• Until the turn of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were the most important traders when the Dutch and English began to challenge their control.

• English sailors have named the middle part of the trade triangle that links Europe to Africa, Africa to the Americas and back to Europe as the "mid passage" for slave vessels traveling across the Atlantic from Africa to America.

  • People had been forced to sleep "in spoon mode," and they were so violently struck by the ship's tossing that the skin was sometimes worn to the bone by scraping on the planks.

• The crew opened the hatch in the morning and brought the captives on the deck and attached them to a big chain running along the bulwarks.

  • Most travels were daily marked.

• The African interior is deeply spread by death and destruction. Kingdoms of the Coast slave trade drew Central African Slaves. Slaves.

  • Many of the new states were just machines to supply European traders with captives and a "arms-slave cycle" thrust them into a destructive race.

  • In those wars, soldiers caught were enslaved by themselves.

4.3: The Development of North American Slave Societies

• The Chesapeake became a "slave society," a place where the main form of labor was slavery.

• The sharp reduction in the number of indentured servants migrating to Chesapeake was perhaps the most important among several developments.

• The British Royal African Company, which in the 1670s started importing slaves directly into North America, was more than happy to provide workers' need.

  • By 1700, Virginia had 5,000 slaves, and the proportion of the African descent in Chesapeake was more than 22%.

  • Slavery had no legal history from England, nor any laws or traditions that would permit or inherit lifetime slavery.

• In the 18th century, the demand for European tobacco was more than 10 times higher, and the increased production in the Chesapeake region was supported in large part.

  • In the eighteenth century, tobacco was by far the only major commodity produced in North America, representing more than a quarter of the value of all colonial exports.

• Until almost a century after it was founded, the Chesapeake became a slave society. But from the beginning, South Carolina was a slave society.

  • The Indian slave trade was the most precious part of the Carolina economy.

• Slavery was fundamental to the Spanish colonial system, but both the church and the crown raised doubts about the Africans' enslavement.

  • In violation of the Christian principles, the papacy denounced slavery.

  • But the institution was not intact and the slave system in Cuba was as brutal as any in America's history in the eighteenth century, when sugar production expanded there.

• In Louisiana, the French colony in Lower Mississippi Valley, slavery has also been important.

  • The settlements and forts of Biloxi and Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico were founded by French colonists at the beginning of the 18th century and New Orleans in 1718, located on the lower Mississippi River.

• In commercial farming areas in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Central New Jersey and Long Island, where Slaves made up approximately 10 percent of rural residents, it grew ever more significant in the eighteenth century.

4.4: African to African American

• Most slaves were field hands and, where necessary, even domestic servants worked in the fields.

  • Masters supplied ruddy clothing for their workers, enough in the summer but almost always insufficient in the winter

• The family was the most important institution for community and cultural development, but slave codes did not provide legally bonded marriages, which would contradict the master's free disposition of his property, as he thought fit.

  • Men and women of dozens of African ethnic groups have become new people during this period.

• Recent Africans were often sought for religious leadership and medical magic in the African American Community.

  • Many Whites across the South trusted in slave conjurers and herbal doctors as the slaves did themselves, and slaves earned fame because of their healing powers.

  • This was one of a number of ways that white and black people came to share a shared culture.

• The only way to make the slaves work was to "let them stand in fear" by the Virginia planter Robert "King" Carter. Men like George Washington, human slaves masters did not want to be hard.

  • As he wrote, he was seeking "quietness and some income."

  • But Mount Vernon was tranquil and threatened with violence.

4.5: Slavery and The Economics of Empire

• The slave trade itself, which one economist of the 18th century described as the 'foundation' of Britain's economy as a 'mainspring of the machine that sets each wheel in motion,' was primarily economic.

• The imperialists created a system of regulations which were known as 'mercantilism' to ensure the benefits of such richness for their own nation state.

  • The political control of the economy by the state was the essence of mercantilist policy.

• Building upon commodities, Parliament adopted between 1651 and 1696 a number of Navigation Acts, which established the legal and institutional structure of the colonial system of Great Britain during the 18th century.

• Within the Utrecht peace of 1713, France was forced, in return for security guarantees for French speakers of these provinces, to cede to Great Britain Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay.

  • Spain had to open its American ports to British traders who also had the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with slaves.

• The grains, flour, meat and milk products produced in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, and also in Chesapeake.

  • None was listed and could be sold abroad free of charge. Neither was listed.

  • In New England ships, much of that trade was carried.

4.6: Slavery, Prosperity, and Freedom

• A highly stratified class society was created by Slavery. An elite of rich planters who held more than half of their farmland and more than 60% of their wealth stood at the summit.

• But Virginia officials took great care to make legal differences between the status of the colonists and that of the Africans when slavery became increasingly significant.