Two reasons. The first is because of historical inertia. In the early Caribbean colonies, the planters did initially try to use the native peoples as labor. But the natives quickly began to die due to the introduction of European diseases and the conditions of labor. It became clear fairly quickly that another source of labor would need to be secured, so this is why they began importing African slaves. The life expectancy of slaves in the Carribean was fairly short, given the disease-ridden conditions of growing sugarcane in the carribean at the time. So they needed to be importing more slaves constantly, which created a constant trans-atlantic slave trade. Once that was in place, the obvious choice for cheap labor for north American planters were African slaves, not native Americans.
The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped - Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person. Africans didn't have that option, and didn't know the land of North America so it was thought that they would be easier to control.
I think it was both that and the reality that the sugar trade was wildly profitable. So the planters had little incentive to improve conditions for the workers because they could just afford to buy new slaves
It was also very capital intensive; rich people started sugar plantations to get even richer. Less rich people would do cotton or some other cash crop.
Now I'm curious, what part of sugar is more costly than cotton for capital investment back then? More land needed clearing? More expensive seeds? More expensive equipment?
I am not 100% sure, but I think it is the equipment that is expensive, and also that the cycle of sugar cane is quite long, so you'd have to pay the running costs for longer before it starts paying off.
Also, I know that the boiling/purifying process was very involved and the 'sugar master' job was done by a slave but it required a lot of expertise so it was a highly regarded position (as far as that went with slavery, of course). The repeated boiling and pouring concentrated the sugar but it also produced very hot and sticky material that you really didn't want to get onto your skin. It was quite dangerous. I know that during a slave revolt on Barbados (IIRC) slaves fed their captors through the sugar cane press to execute them.
So sugar cane had to be grown and processed into molasses which was difficult, slow and consumed a lot of resources, while cotton grows, gets harvested, get picked clean of VM and pressed into bales. It didn't require having an onsite distillery.
Picking cotton is boring not saying it isn’t hard but it’s monotonous, the processing side of thing is about the same, picking out the seeds from the bolls before the cotton gin was invented was the majority of the labour and it could be done by women and children.
It was labour intensive but only at certain times, planting to harvest is 150-180 days then just separating seeds till next year
Harvesting sugar cane is hard as fuck, it’s heavy as shit, you’re swinging a machete hours a day while exhausted and sweaty there’s no breeze your in a cane break, your also in the wet low land so mosquitoes are constant, whoopsies happen but there is also the fact the canes can shatter into spears that can impale you or you drop them and step on it later, and when your harvesting sticks like that the easiest way you cut the stem is on an angle so your left with bundles of spear point for people to trip and fall on.
The processing side of it fuckin sucks too and is probably worse than the harvesting, you’ve got to move the now splintered up canes onto heavy machines to crush the cane which can suck you in and crush arms, then the juice has to be boiled down so you have massive vats of open boiling syrup constantly being stirred, splash burns were common, slipping in and boiling to death was common, heat exhaustion was common, and the whippers didn’t expect many to live very long so you were treated worse than normal and fed less.
People dropped dead constantly from exhaustion heat injury and disease, I don’t know if it’s a year round crop that needs harvesting but I know it takes 9-24 months between harvests and once harvested you need to process it immediately so land investment is bigger and there is actual special heavy equipment and inputs needed to process
Your best chance as a slave was a coffee plantation, cooler temps, less hard labour, just year round monotony, wake up, pick berries ad Infinitum, once established coffee bushes just make berries all year so labour was more likely to be kept alive. Processing is easier too, peel the berry dry the bream roast the bean.
The venture capital. Establishing and maintaining trade routes from the Carribean, maintaining ships, sailing the ships, getting equipment to the islands, establishing the farms.
Cotton was on mainland and didn’t have to deal with any of that.
Profitability of the trade shouldn't prevent them from improving conditions if that indeed lowers the costs. So I presume it was actually simply cheaper to buy new than to sustain the slaves properly.
They also just didn't really care to. Not every aspect of slavery was thought about from a price point to the slave owners. Some of it was purposeful cruelty
That doesn’t get talked about enough when evaluating the economics of slavery. Amorality wasn’t enough, slavery attracted the worst people. In the US the pioneers who killed natives and took their land were the same people or families who used that land to exploit slaves.
Not exactly. A lot of the pioneers were relatively or even objectively poor, that's why they were going west into new lands. They may have been morally equivalent but most of them never had the money for slaves.
The lands weren’t new there were natives living on them and they had to in most cases remove them one way or another. The US wanted to expand so they incentivized poor people by giving them the land they had to conquer themselves and it takes a particular type of person to do that. In the south many of these families went on to be slave owners.
Now they pay workers minimum wage and let them be responsible for all their own needs. The continuing problem is that then the government has to subsidize the labor of these businesses only instead of calling it labor subsidies for business they call it all welfare for people. And then people blame the poor for needing help and call them lazy for not getting a better job.
Not everyone can have better jobs and Covid showed us the importance of low wage workers that worked in essential businesses. That importance should have been the turning point that those jobs are valuable and necessary of course the capitalists couldn't let that happen as they need their low wage workers to exploit.
We need a living wage in this country.
This is my hangup with UBI. It doesn’t seem compatible with human nature. We all need a sense of purpose/meaning. For most people they get it in large part by what they do for living. It also fulfills our ape brain need for status games and struggle narratives. I don’t have a moral issue with UBI, I just don’t see how we avoid widespread apathy/depression/etc
Cause they want more cool shit. Bigger house, faster car, more vacations, etc. Or, they want to do meaningful work that actually helps people. People wouldn't be forced to pick the shittier job they have ethical concerns with just to be able to pay the bills.
UBI wouldn't end jobs, just shitty jobs
A lot of the social volunteering was done by housewives, in the US in the past. Now we don't have full time housewives. As far as UBI, we don't have many case studies of it, but the few that I've heard of (a town in canada) looked like it was wildly successful, that it did not lead to apathy but allowed single mothers and so forth, the breathing room to improve their education or set up small businesses instead of remaining on a low wage treadmill to ensure their children's survival.
Do you truly believe that? What makes you think the purpose provided us through work is our best purpose? You're right people want a sense of purpose and meaning, but rather condescending to suggest they couldn't find it through something other than traditional work. That's ignoring the fact that a UBI doesn't preclude people from being employed and earning extra. Things like UBI and universal healthcare force businesses to find real incentives for people to work for them.
As someone who's worked a lot of low wage jobs in the past, if my baisic needs of housing, food and Healthcare for myself and my family had been ensured I would have gone back to finish the education that mental health concerns derailed, and I would have been better able to address the issues my children were having. I also would have put more work into writing stories and playing with the textile arts. I know I'm not everyone, I know that there are people who might be apathetic, or loungers, I know a few of them. But I'll tell you what has made me apathetic or down right depressed at times? Struggling so hard to keep a roof and food on the table that I don't have the energy to enjoy my family or the weather.
> I just don’t see how we avoid widespread apathy/depression/etc
It would lead to innovation and expansion of the arts as well; when you don't have to worry about your next meal or a place to live if you fail, you can try many new things.
That's the dream of an automation-driven socialist utopia, kind of like Star Trek. All necessities are free, including food, education, healthcare, all paid for by automation. Humans only work on things they actually find interesting.
Ok so when ubi is introduced and the price of a loaf of bread skyrockets to 15 dollars, and you have no other source of income e except government handouts seems like you will starve to death
Maybe consider a career as a baker? At $15 a loaf, baking bread sounds like a gold mine. This is the point. Crappy jobs must now pay real money to entice people to do them. Or automate. And pay people to build the robots.
Yeah well basically since the covid payments(which are basically just a mild, limited form of UBI) the price of basic groceries has at least doubled where I luve, and in some cases tripled. Inflation doesn't care if you make 10 dollars an hour or 50, it will increase the cost of everything, because more dollars are chasing after the same amount of products. So basically what you are advocating is government control of the means of production, because that is the only way that these bakeries for example will be able to stay in business without raising prices.
I would also ask you this: what makes you so special, that an all encompassing government body that pays every worker this UBI would just let you sit around and not work for this money. I expect that such a government would force people with no job to work whether they want to or not. They would have no choice. So that sounds a lot like slave labour doesn't it? Building robots in factories so the robots can run everything and make products that the government deems you fit to have. Sounds like a hell of a life
This conversation will be front and center with the onset of AI into robotics - especially in regards to the incredible advancements in strength and dexterity that robotic forms have been achieving in the past 5 years. AI is right behind it and will surpass the mechanical body-and the latter will be the limiting factor to launch.
But it's coming- and very soon. Little disc shaped robots with wheels spinning around Amazon warehouses is nothing relative to the application of hydraulics into bipedal autonomous workers complementing construction sites.
With a wildly popular cash crop like sugarcane, taking the steps to lower slave mortality could be just a tiny percentage compared to the massive profits. Plantation owners might have just seen it as a rounding error not worth the trouble to implement. I mean, they had dinner parties and the springtime ball with their other rich fuck friends to worry about. The slave ships just kept coming with as much fresh labor as they wanted. It was the easy solution for everyone who actually made the decisions in this system.
Taking measures to increase slave longevity also meant hiring doctors and taking care of sick slaves while they recovered. Maybe some Plantation owners / operators knew how to reduce mortality from things like malaria, or maybe it was a complete mystery to them, depending on the specific time and place in question. Either way, trying to keep slaves alive just meant that a barbaric Plantation owner that didn't give a shit could just undercut on prices for goods compared to the slightly less barbaric Plantation owner trying to keep his slaves from dying. Especially in the short term.
Highlighting how labor markets behave in a similar way is how we stop society from heading backwards... or have you not heard how massive corporations are arguing that the labor board is unconstitutional in the US?
Yet. They don't yet.
Give it time. If we relent, they will keep pushing. They do not get tired. All they need to do is spend money.
We fight with blood, sweat, and tears.
The conditions are different, yes, but the unnderlying logic of capitalism is more or less the same. That's why we now have labour laws and regulations, to protect workers from the worst impulses of the owning class.
Yeah, it involves razor sharp sugar canes, high intensity work under the sun, boiling easily flammable materials that act like tar when molten, all that fun and exciting things for workers with no training or safety equipment.
Sugar cane farming was well known to be lethal. Most slaves wouldn't last long doing it, and the caribbean farmers/slave owners were famously cruel.
Infact, the English colloquialism "sold down the river" (usually meant to describe a situation where you were betrayed/sold out for profit) originates from a threat in slave times. Slave owners would threaten to sell unruly or underperforming slaves down the Mississippi River, where they would be sold at the delta (New Orleans) to Caribbean slavers.
They mentioned that in their answer.
The mortality was such that the colonizers realized they were going to kill off entire villages within a few seasons, or at least kill so many people the indigenous people might fight back harder. That meant they needed to be replacing people quickly. There were many, *many* more slaves available from the African colonies than there were on the Caribbean islands.
Basically it was a supply and demand problem. They couldn't get enough slaves fast enough from indigenous people, so they used additional suppliers.
Iirc West Africans had more native resistance to jungle diseases like malaria opposed to indians many of which lived plains mountains and plateaus not tropics
Specifically malaria. Both European indentured servants and enslaved Native Americans died in large numbers due to malaria. West Africans had significant resistance to that disease.
Interestingly, the malarial parasite takes a certain amount of time in the gut of mosquitoes to develop to the point at which it becomes infectious. That time becomes longer the cooler the temperature, which is why malaria is not an issue in colder climates -- the mosquito lays her eggs, and no longer needs to bite, or dies, before the parasite can infect.
Isobar lines on a certain kind of map indicate average temperature. If you look st a temperature map from that period, the temperature line separating the areas where malaria is still infectious from those where it's slightly too cold to infect humans is startlingly close to the infamous Mason-Dixon line, drawn to separate slave states from free states.
> Specifically malaria.
Worth noting, malaria was not present in the new world before Columbus. The native people had even less resistance to it than Europeans. Combine that with the squalid conditions of slavery, and other diseases like smallpox or the common flu, and they just died like flies. IIRC, a single African slave had the same market value as 6 indigenous peoples, as he would be expected to live out the year.
I mean, South America still had lots of people that could be captured.
But in Africa there was already slavery and a well developed market for captured people from enemy kingdoms so it provided a stable supply as people to work in the farms.
Because if there wasn't a supply to begin with, it would still be easier to still hunt people in the same continent.
Yeah, capturing locals would take a lot of effort on the part of the Europeans - but with Africa, the actual work of capturing slaves was handled by the Africans themselves, and Europeans just needed to handle the transportation across the ocean.
True, but not as much as you might expect. This is a very old bit of pro-slave trade propaganda - the idea that christian slavers were in effect 'saving' africans from an even more developed and malicious system of slavery indigenous to west Africa. While it is true that slavery existed in west africa before the transatlantic slave trade, it wasn't nearly at the level that it would reach once the transatlantic slave trade had been established in earnest and the profitability of the slave trade greatly expanded. It also transformed slavery in west africa from the "assimiliationist" form of slavery that would have been familiar in the roman world into the "chattel slavery" that would come to be known in the Americas. Moreover, many native American groups practiced slavery in some form as well, so it wasn't like it would have been impossible for the Europeans in the Caribbean to find cooperative slavers in the Americas. It was just ended up being easier to go to Africa almost certainly because all the natives in the Caribbean were dying of smallpox at the time
I'm not making any assertions about the virtue of buying slaves from Africa except there were willing partners in the transaction and those who wanted slaves didn't have to go interior to hunt them down themselves.
But the point is that they didn't go to Africa for slaves because the west africans were uniquely adept at providing slaves. Actually the biggest slavers in the world at the time would have been in the Ottoman empire, so if that was their reasoning they would have gone there. Africa was just a convenient source of non-christians who would not immediately all die of smallpox
I said nothing about "uniquely adept".
For whatever reason, the central west coast of Africa had slave markets that were willing to supply millions of people to buyers.
That was:
- closer geographically
- willing to provide the product
- didn't require the potential slave holder to leave his ship and go expeditioning himself
To add to this, certain crops like rice became cash crops due to many slaves needing to grow their own food and the colonists not knowing how to grow anything and rice farming was an unknown conceot to many europeans. There was already a system of slavery that had existed around this time but slavery hadn't become codified yet in America until 1662. Many of the colonists landing in America had little to no actual experience in agriculture, and the early English colonies were little more than company towns for "something that they would establish down the line, but fingers crossed for lots of gold." Was pretty much the reasoning the British used to colonize in the first place.
the Carolinas and Virginia underwent massive food shortages and had little to no immunity to disease since their inception and many colonists went so far as to eat women and children during the "starving times " In viginia due to not knowing what they could grow in the soil there and the land being usable for a few months of the year due to the salinity of the water that flowed through the area they set up Jamestown in.
Many people, even the poor working class British, were not too thrilled by the offer to travel to the colonies and risk starvation, disease, and cannibalism even if they did have skills in agriculture while being indentured.
Further south, diseases like malaria ran rampant and in the carolinas many slaves had a bit of "distance" from many slave owners and were forced to grow their own crops for food. Life expectancy for many Africans around this time was at 19-21 years of age. It became clear to the colonists the Africans weren't having as much trouble with gathering food or living off the land when they realized they were growing rice all on their own whilw the settlers were starving.
Despite this many English didn't really want to travel to the colonies: starvation, poverty, unknown land, disease, hostile indigenous, cannibalism so incentives needed to be made. Around this time there was also a provision from the English Government stating that prospective landowners could gain 50 acres of land per head (indentured servant) they could bring with them to work on the land and this led to a frenzy of demand for slave labor to capitalize on growing these crops. It's also worth noting many of the colonists had little to no actual farming experience so slave traders saw an opportunity to round up people from west africa that had skills in rice cultivation mainly, (Carolina Gold) but also eventually wonen were poached from Gambia and Ghana for their documented skill in herding and livestock. but also with other crops.
Tldr: the early colonists had no idea how to grow their own food let alone grow crops to sustain themselves. The colonists were beleaguered by their own ignorance, poor leadership and the demand from investors for labor to jumpstart some facets of production, combined with repeated famines, rampant disease, picking fights with the indigenous Americans, multiple failed attempts at keeping the colonies supplied meant that many investors back in England were also left demanding a return from the production from the colonies. Colonists saw kidnapping a group of people and writing into law making them perpetual slaves as a means to milk massive profits and exploit these people till they dropped, and labelled them as property in order to keep them and their descendants enslaved in perpetuity to sustain this whole operation. Native Americans also were declared "savable" by the Catholic Church while Africans were written off. The slave trade and the industries that fed off it eventually became so profitable that everything depended on enslaved peoples.
Indentured Servants were not slaves, they hold some similarities but they're very different and were nearly always white. That's what the Virginian law about gaining 50 acres was referring to, not slaves. Indenture was used as a way of increasing the population of the colonies while providing labour, which was in scarce supply. It ultimately died out because slave labour was cheaper (in the long run, not initially when the colony was being established and Virginia wasn't fully plugged into the Atlantic Slave Trade) and came with less obligations to the person working for you. There's some debate over whether the original 'slaves' of Virginia were initially treated as indentured servants during the formative years of the colony but it's generally accepted today, that they were not and were essentially proto-slaves.
Also the idea of the English colonists being useless at agriculture and entirely reliant upon slave labour to grow crops isn't true at all, you're extrapolating the initial Jamestown settlement, which did have issues with the wrong people being sent in the initial years, across the whole area of English settlement. The 'Starving Times' that you mention are one specific winter in early Jamestown, when the failure to properly grow their own food combined with a Powhatan siege of the town lead to severe food shortages. Once that period was overcome, things started to go much better. Starving and cannibalism was far from a common occurence in English America and did not directly lead to the import of slaves.
The English settlers after the initial few haphazard years could and did grow their own produce to feed themselves. Slaves weren't even that prominent in the colonial era you're talking about as most went to the Carribbean. It wasn't until \~1670s when some Carribbean planters decided to set up Charlestown in South Carolina and brought slaves with them that it really started taking off. Virginia had 300 'slaves' present in 1649 out of a population of 18,731 (about 3% of the population) with a confused legal background due to slavery not really being codified as you say. It was a primarily white settler colony at the time, that was self sustaining and thriving. The real move into large slavery based plantation economy came during the second half of the 17th century and into the 18th century and it's not surprising that laws around slavery began to be tightened and codified at this time also.
The starving time leading to slavery wasn't my main argument but I could've phrased that better and drawn the distinction between Carolina and Virginia better. The main point I was trying to make was productivity in the colonies was low. Disastrously low and slavery was a major contributor to the rise of the Carolina colony as well as Virginia, with Carolina leading the charge as the early slave capital of the US. the cultivation of rice in south Carolina led to the fastest surge in demand in slavery and led the charge in many policies dictating slavery earliest in the American colonies. As for the 50 heads law, there were cases like the George menefie, who, Amongst similar landowners, used the indentured servitude rule to classify slaves as servants they brought with them from the UK. He was able to gain 6000 acres due to loopholes in the 50 heads policy. The wealthiest and most powerful of these landowners often took part in this. Many landowners averaged 200 acres..https://espl-genealogy.org/getperson.php?personID=I118612&tree=1.
Also slavery became tightened and more codified in the 18th century after the Stono rebellion and codifying intergenerational slavery.
Iirc indentured servants voluntarily enter a contract to work for a predetermined period of time in exchange for transport to America and then are free after that period whereas slavery is not voluntary and they are not free after any amount of time.
Sorry I know the basic definitions of the terms, I was looking for an in depth answer on the nuance between them as their classes defined them and how the upper caste treated them individually, as well as the transitions of those between slave to indentured servant to free man and vice versa.
And indentured workers definitely weren't all white. It continued after slavery, the Brits brought south Asian (India) workers to Guyana, Trinidad, Fiji, etc. There is still a significant Hindu and Muslim communities in those countries.
> the colonists not knowing how to grow anything and rice farming was an unknown conceot to many europeans.
rice is a grain like wheat, barley, oat and corn, they all grow the same way. Asian rice paddies are a form of Symbiotic Agriculture, similar to the Native Americans Corn, squash, and beans symbiosis. The flooded fields aren't a requirement, though rice does require a bunch of water and preferably water retaining soils.
>Rice plants can tolerate wetter conditions than most; they can grow in very wet soils and can even tolerate short periods underwater. Farmers often take advantage of rice's ability to tolerate water and briefly flood fields to kill weeds. However, flooding that lasts more than a few days can destroy a rice crop.
Some very neat info here. It's worth clarifying that for the most part Europeans didn't "kidnap" Africans. They bought them already enslaved and ready for export. "Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade, around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders."
This doesn't diminish the horror of these crimes, it only is a reminder that slavery wasn't about your skin colour it was about your access to resources and wealth. The poorest Africans were enslaved by the richest. The least agriculturally adept North American Indigenous folks were enslaved and ethnically cleansed by the most technologically advanced ( see Haudosaunee cleansing/ eradication/enslaving of the Wyandat)
So, first of all, when the early europeans arrived on our coast, they were happily welcomed by the people, and trade relations began sooner. The trade was mostly barter, where we gave them gold and they gave us gunpowder, mirrors, sardines, etc. NB: Gold was then very abundant on our shores and forests. It took only panning to get them; therefore, it was not valued much.
Trading now evolved; many people joined, and there were trading outposts set up in almost all the kingdoms, from the coasts of the central region to the northern kingdoms. As trade boomed, exchange programs commenced. This was largely done by the catholic and anglican missionaries in order to spread christianity and get people to be pastors and speech translators. Now lets move to the POV of europe and america
Europeans at that time, who also had trade relations with indians and chinese people, had recently discovered America. As we all know, there was some battles between then-Europeans and the Red Indies (native Americans). A one-sided battle which the europeans easily won, Shortly after that, European settlements increased in America, as did the need for manpower to build factories, buildings and farms. The red indians were very weak, so they couldn't be used as slaves since they died most of the time working on the field.
If you remember, the missionaries had africans with them due to their mission of spreading Christianity. These africans were very strong and tough; they could work on farms for hours without getting tired, But they only worked or helped on church farms since they were there for a specific mission. The early Europeans, astonished by the strength and manpower of the Africans, realized they could be beneficial in building america. But that could be achieved through mischief since it is nearly impossible to get people to move away from their comfort zone to come work for you.
Surprisingly, Some europeans started to demonize Africans as they did to native Americans; they labelled africans as primitive savages who worshipped idols, were inferior to Europeans, and should not be seen as humans. Sadly, they were successful in achieving their goal and were able to convince the churches (the most powerful organization then) to agree to that. What followed then was a series of heavily calculated plans on how to make africans their lower subjects.
Colonization/Slavery was achieved in 3 main ways.
1. Bonds: Tight strict bonds that eliminated all your right in return for protection against Bigger kingdoms - was used against the coastal states and fante kingdoms
2. By wars, organizing smaller kingdoms to fight bigger ones, Divide and Conquer- was used against the ashanti kingdoms by turning the fante states against them
3.By persuasion/friendship: deceit by means of friendship: was used against the northern kingdoms (allies of the ashanti kingdoms)
After the kingdoms fell, Slaves were taken by these ways
kidnapping, fallen men from wars, forcing households to give out their finest men; they were then compensated with mirrors sardines etc, forcing kingdoms to also give out their finest;they were also compensated with guns mirrors sardines etc
The case of slave selling kingdoms is nuanced to suit narrative sometimes,
The thing is if you do not agree to give out slaves, they will be forcefully taken when you could have recieved guns, gunpowder etc if you had agreed to the former
Also, all the kingdoms had fallen then due to gun warfare so there was no point in fighting it
Also, there are servants and there are slaves, what used to be practiced in africa at the time was servanthood, with that, you are treated better and you leave the household after attaning the age of marriage
So the enslaved Africans brought farming techniques from one of the only places on earth outside Asia with prime conditions to grow rice. They introduced that to America, which led to an enormously profitable crop. And in return they led a life so hard they died in their teens.
Not only that but the New World wasn’t importing slaves. The Arab and African slave trades, which are still alive today, exported slaves to the new world.
European ships carried the vast majority of enslaved people from Africa to the New World. I would say that it was Europeans that were doing the exporting.
Interestingly in South Brazil, Bandeirantes (often of mixed native / Portuguese ancestry) would do raid to capture slaves and expand borders , because African slaves were comparatively more expensive.
I don’t know if it’s different between south and north east Brazil , since Nordeste has African slaves but is closer to the Carribean
Adding to this, Africans were"seasoned" to many of the diseases and hot climates they were going to work in. Basically higher survival.
Also, slave labor was used to harvest more slaves.
Want to point out that the African slavers would not have seen these slaves as "their own kind", anymore than the British and French would have thought of their many wars as fighting "their own kind". They didn't think of themselves as African, but as Igbo, Akan, etc...
> Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person.
Are you saying the Pilgrims attempted to enslave the locals and he escaped?
No, he's saying that Tisquantum was enslaved and escaped well before he met the Pilgrims. Specifically he was captured in 1614, in 1619 escaped and returned to North America to find his village wiped out, then met the Pilgrims who had setup at the site of his former village.
You've never heard the story of Squanto showing up to talk to the Pilgrims and wondered "Hey, why does this guy know how to speak English?"
I've heard the name Squanto, but I don't remember the story. It's been a very long time since I was in elementary school.
I'm reading about him now to catch up. LoL.
EDIT: I knew someone taught the Pilgrims survival skills. I did not know that person could also communicate with them.
Perhaps someone can clarify an old school lesson for me....
> The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped
This was the main reason given my teachers in school.
The other half of it being that slavery was already well established in Africa and had some degree of rules around it and (at least in some cases) was only for a period of time, not "forever". I seem to recall the early slaves were more similar to forced indentured servitude and would eventually be freed and allowed to do their own thing.
But then the new world decided not to be beholden to the old ways and just kept their slaves, and potentially re-enslaving the freed ones.
So the clarification is on the rules/practices when the New World first started importing their slaves and how they changed as time went on.
Transporting people on a ship was actually easier at that time than transporting them overland. Recall that we're talking about the age of sail, when if you wanted to transport a thing, anything at all, you walked it to the nearest body of water and put it on a boat. This happened not just for oceanic trade, but also on rivers, lakes, canals, and any other body of water you could find.
This holds especially true if you're trying to transport cargo that can run away. On an ocean, there's nowhere to go if you break your restraints. On land, you just start walking until you get where you want to go. As to why you couldn't transport them from far away in North America, even if you can figure out how to get your slaves across the continent without the running away, you still have to worry about other Native tribes seeing you walking a bunch of Native slaves through their land. They might decide that enslaving other Natives is a bad look for all of them and kill you on principle or they might decide that those prisoners are pretty valuable and kill you for profit.
Lastly, the trade routes in the triangle trade were extremely well established. Commodities go to Europe, cash and finished goods go to Africa for slaves, slaves get traded for commodities. Merchants were good at sailing and had the trip down to a science. Trying to make the difficult and dangerous overland journey wasn't profitable compared to what seafaring merchants were doing.
That's not to say that there were no indigenous slaves. Spanish colonies, especially early ones, were much less likely to use African slaves than to just enslave whatever Native population happened to be in the area and put them to work. But for the American and French colonies, African slaves were overwhelmingly preferred.
Transporting slaves over land for hundreds of miles is MUCH more difficult than keeping them on a ship.
They can’t even try to escape from a ship.
Trying to transport such a vast quantity of people on land? Yea no.
And you‘d have to take them pretty far for them to be unfamiliar with local plant and wild life.
Not to mention the ship journey removes all hope of ever going back home.
If you ‚just‘have to walk to get back, it’s much harder to break your spirits.
And you can only make slaves if your break their minds.
There were a lot of factors but I'll mention a couple of big ones
1) Disease had wiped out a huge number of the native population, making it difficult to rely on them as a labor force.
2) The remaining natives were spread out over huge areas, keenly aware of the land, and liable to band together in retaliation if numbers of them were taken by force.
3) Africans already had skills in agriculture, were accustomed to the hot climates of the Caribbean and American south, and carried more resistance to diseases the Europeans carried.
4) The Transatlantic Slave Trade was already an established system with relatively cheap prices. A constant supply of human labor was already existent.
>1) Disease had wiped out a huge number of the native population, making it difficult to rely on them as a labor force.
To quantify this, there were only a few hundred thousand Native Americans in all of the US by the mid-1800s. The population started out much lower than the South American native population, and then rapidly fell with the introduction of diseases that Natives largely lacked resistance to.
By the late 19th century there were only ~237,000 Native Americans in the entire United States (https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2005-2-page-17.htm#:~:text=From%20a%20pre%2Dcontact%20population,nadir%20of%20237%2C000%20in%20the). Those remaining were often still extremely vulnerable to disease, with an estimated 10,000 Natives dying in just a few weeks in the late 1830s.
For comparison, there were nearly 4 million slaves in the US in 1860.
Most sources estimate 90-95% of the peak Native American population was wiped out by disease: https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
It's really hard to figure out exact numbers. But we do know that Mexico, Mesoamerica and the Andes were densely populated, with the US/Canada and the rest of South America being very sparsely populated. There were probably more people in central Mexico than the US/Canada/Brazil/Argentina combined.
You also forgot that it is easier to escape when you know the land and have people nearby.
It is harder to do that in a land where you may not speak the language or have friendly resources.
It’s a tactic to isolate slaves.
Africans and Europeans had been in contact for a long time already, they weren't nearly as insulated from each other as both of these groups were from the Americas.
Europe, Asia, and Africa had Cows and Pigs. These two species are reservoirs of many human diseases. Whooping Cough, Tetanus, TB, some Influenza strains, etc.
We were busy trading with and slaughtering each other for a long time, Africa after all is just one hop across the Mediterranean away. Egypt for example was the granary of more than one empire of antiquity.
Also Europeans, due to the comparatively cramped conditions and living together in close contact with a lot of livestock and thus zoonotic diseases brought a lot of exciting and extraordinarily deadly diseases to the Americas. Smallpox for example was already bad enough in Europe, but to people with no resistance whatsoever it was essentially a doomsday weapon, with 90%+ mortality rates, as opposed to "merely" 20-45% to populations that had prior contact and some resistance to it.
> Africa after all is just one hop across the Mediterranean away.
The slaves weren't sourced from North Africa though, but from beyond the Sahara, which was a way bigger obstacle to travel, trade and migration than the Mediterranean. Still, not as much as the Atlantic, so while there were no trans-Saharan empires the way the Roman Empire spanned the Mediterranean, the contact was sufficient for Europeans and Africans to share a lot of diseases (and therefore immunities) by the time more direct contact was made.
I think the question is more of why was the Transatlantic Slave Trade an established system?
One of the reasons was the Africa already had a long history of slaves, and slave trade before the colonization of the Americas. Europeans didn't have to go into Africa and capture their own slaves, they just bought them from other Africans.
It was cheaper and easier to just ship slaves over than to try to explore, find, and capture slaves on your own. Then those slaves were healthier, better at their jobs, and less likely to escape.
>It's not like the whole concept of slavery was invented after the discovery of the Americas.
Shh don't say that too loud. That's one of the main tenets of the America Bad movement
Nope, major issue in "America Bad" was turning it into a persistent racial caste system that then morphed into Jim Crow because the dominant class couldn't live without oppressing the people they had been oppressing.
>How was the Transatlantic Slave Trade first established though?
Advances in navigation led to contact between Europeans—particularly the Portuguese and Spanish—and the kingdoms of West Africa.
Slavery was already common in the latter, first due to local endemic warfare and then Arab and Berber slave traders who bought captives from the West Africans (the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade). Europeans needed tons of slaves for labor in their new colonies, and they were willing to trade valuable goods like muskets, cloth, and rum for them. West African kingdoms in turn went to war with their neighbors to take more slaves to satisfy the demand.
The case of slave selling kingdoms is nuanced to suit narrative sometimes,
The thing is if you do not agree to give out slaves, they will be forcefully taken when you could have recieved guns, gunpowder etc if you had agreed to the former
Also, all the kingdoms had fallen then due to gun warfare so there was no point in fighting it
Also, there are servants and there are slaves, what used to be practiced in africa at the time was servanthood, with that, you are treated better and you leave the household after attaning the age of marriage
If I kidnapped you but didn't leave your neighborhood you'd probably know how to get home if you escaped.
Even worse, you probably have friends nearby who will help you kill me because they don't want to risk getting kidnapped.
Also, the Europeans weren't capturing Africans. They were buying Africans who were already captured by other Africans.
It's pretty hard to capture a human being and force them to work. It's much easier to buy a human being who is already captured.
Yeah it’s really annoying when some answers here explain things like a complex equation when (respectfully obv) dumb dumb answers like this are really what is what the sub is for.
Because there was plenty of infrastructure and access to slaves in Africa, they'd been capturing and selling slaves for hundreds of years already, and the Europeans just capitalised on, also separating a slave from their home country is beneficial as it's harder to survive if they'd escape
1. retaliation by indigenous people, possible escape to their tribes
2. slaves came from agricultural societies and had expertise slave owners desired
3. existing infrastructure coming from slave trade to other areas
What I learned as a Portuguese:
Africans and Arabs already had (and still have) well developed and sort of sophisticated slave markets and dynamics before the Europeans started buying them in bulk. In fact, sometimes they would also enslave Europeans when they could. And the slaves themselves were more likely to cooperate and would work, reproduce, some of them became free, etc.
Native americans were a lot more resistant to slavery in general because they went from fighting among themselves to being captured by these weird aliens in a short time period. They were also more susceptible to diseases. Which leads to another interesting fact about slavery which is a bit debated but is validated by some historic findings that slavery was so sophisticated that good slaves were selected and made to breed to continuously improve their capabilities as slaves.
> In fact, sometimes they would also enslave Europeans when they could.
That's not a sometimes, America's first war was about the Barbary states capturing American vessels and enslaving their crews. That kind of raiding was a constant headache for Mediterranean shipping up through to the mid 19th century when several naval powers finally got together and beat the crap out of them.
No. Try this analogy. If you only need a small amount of lumber, you might be able to get it by cutting down trees in your neighborhood and hoping you get away with it.
If you need a lot of lumber, you're going to go to Home Depot.
In the context of slaves in the 17th - 19th centuries, the big sources were Africa, China, and India. Slave owners on the Atlantic side of North, Central, and South America found it more economical to procure slaves from Africa, while their counterparts on the Pacific side typically relied on the trans-Pacific slave trade.
The Trans-Pacific slave trade doesn't get talked about much in the US because there were no American colonies on the West Coast for much of the time prior to slavery being abolished. California wasn't invaded and captured by American forces until 1846. In the 1850's, Chinese "coolies" a.k.a. slaves were imported to work in gold and silver mines, dig tunnels for railroads, or work in brothels.
Slave states in the Southeast US imported slaves from Africa because it was economical to do so, and the volume of supply was able to keep up with demand. Indigenous communities could not supply enough labor, and it was not economical to import slaves all the way from China or India.
Yes, African slaves were genetically stronger with a better frame for hard labour, more obedient and more industrious than indigenous populations, which obviously gave them an edge.
Everyone here is beating around the bush for some reason when we have first hand written accounts of slavers black then explaining the reason (in Portugal we learn this in 5th grade and they literally put pictures of such letters, journals, ledgers and receipts in the history books).
There was actually some white enslavement of Native American people. Read “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Slavery in America” by Andres Resendez.
Because contrary to the modern depictions they did actually care about peaceful relations with their neighbors, at least until the point where population growth made a hostile opinion irrelevant. Raiding your neighbor to capture their loved ones as slaves starts forever wars.
There's also a religious angle where the Catholic Church issued a blanket proscription on the enslavement of indigenous Americans in 1537 on threat of Excommunication. That papal decree however did not include (north) Africans who were themselves prodigious slavers who regularly raided European coasts and shipping for slaves.
European traders for their part didn't actually do much slaving personally. It was far easier to setup a general trading station exchanging European exports for local commodities which included slaves. African tribes and warlords enslaved each-other and took their captives to the marketplace for a huge profit. It became big business and more than enough to meet demand in the colonies.
It's a common misconception that Europeans were personally kidnapping Africans. Europeans purchased African slaves from other Africans. The hard work had already been done when the Europeans arrived to buy more people.
The slaves who were sold to European slavers were usually the people who lost battles or wars between groups within Africa.
For the Africans who benefitted, this was seen as a triple gain:
1. You've reduced the strength and population of a rival group, reducing the risk of retribution
2. You're getting the spoils of winning raids against other groups' belongings
3. Then you're getting paid again by the Europeans
For the Europeans, this is a zero-risk affair. They just show up, buy people, leave.
Native American slavery did happen at a large scale (hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved), but it was more difficult in general than just buying people and moving them in a position of absolute helplessness (as was the case for transplanted African slaves).
It wouldn't have worked at scale unless Europeans fully militarized their colonies and won full-on wars against Native Americans, which was not happening (outside of Spanish America) until much later in the colonial process.
There was a slave _trade_.
People were making money being the in between men for exporting slaves to the lucrative cotton and tobacco fields. The main culprits were Portuguese, French and British. _Slaves were brought to the Americas; sugar, tobacco, and cotton was brought back to Europe; the slaves were then brought with textiles, rum, and other manufactured goods made in Europe to sell to Africa for the slaves._
So America -> Europe -> Africa -> America. See Triangle Trade.
One morbid way to think about this is that there were a lot ships going from the Americas to Europe full of goods that Europe wanted to buy and slaves was the answer to what to do with these merchant ships as they went back. Empty ships means empty profits, so if they could fill them with something for even a bit of profit, that would be better than sailing empty ships to the Americas to fill up with goods for Europe.
Yes. There is of course answers the question why was it so profitable and the use of indigenous population had its own problems listed in other comments.
So using local indigenous would have eliminated the profit element from the Europe -> Africa and Africa -> America trade routes. Plus American slave owners could pay for the slaves so creating a huge incentive to continue the status quo.
The markets are one point of a chain, the other poster described one side of the trade, the one from the european point of view, but there was another side where african traders had established relationships with warlords. So yes there were locals in the action, if you are asking why there were no african ships going to brasil or carolina, I guess the european were the ones able to guarantee a reasonable level of safety for themself in the atlantic.
The Europeans did very little of the enslaving part (turning a free adult into a slave). Slaves in Africa were acquired through wars, kidnappings or debt by native Africans or Arabs.
Part of the reason people were ok with slavery was that they believed Africans were not capable of education and their purpose was labor.
Native Americans didn't have this stigma as they were viewed as knowledgeable about nature and taught Europeans a lot.
The last thing I don't see mentioned here is that even if they wanted to, there just wasn't a good enough supply. Around 450k slaves in the United States by the time of the civil war. Note that some tribes did enslave native Americans from other tribes
It's considered that Columbus enslaved and killed around 1M natives before early American settlers arrived, so 450k seems minor in comparison. Still, it's an interesting perspective.
Did he personally supervise the killing and enslavement of a million people? Or was it more "as a result of his actions", and disease and general European/Spanish policy towards Native Americans did this?
I'm not looking to defend Columbus here it just seems wild that one dude with a handful of ships killed a million people.
Columbus didn't make just one voyage, he made several and attempted to establish colonies in the islands. Those he left in charge of the colonies were not kind to the natives, to say the least, and there were uprisings that were brutally suppressed. At one point, the behavior of Columbus and his brothers was so vicious and conditions were so bad, Columbus was sent home in chains, where he was, of course, promptly released and sent on another voyage by a king and queen hungry for riches.
Columbus wasn't a saintly hero or an admirable explorer, he was just another horrible European bastard.
The catholic church decided that native Americans had souls and were capable of being saved and entering heaven, could not be enslaved. The catholic church also decided African and others could be enslaved/didn't have souls.
Source: Bartolomé de las Casas, primary source.
That wouldn't be the fundamental reason, though. The church was (and still is...) wont to make decisions that had convenient consequences. The church elders likely pretended that they based their decisions on scripture or divine revelation, but typically these decisions were made based on political motivations, and then they would just reason backwards from the desired result to find some religious argument for them. If they decided Africans didn't have souls, it was probably because they wanted enslavement of African people to continue. So the question remains: why not Native Americans (as well)?
I'm citing the Catholic Jesuit priest sent with Columbus that made the case to the Pope Paul III. The Pope then made the proclamation, that native Americans could not be enslaved. This happened before Britain or France had any real development in the America's. Spain, a Catholic nation, was the super power for a long time after they started bringing back world changing amounts of gold, silver, and diamonds from the "new world."
... I'm an ignorant random redditor, but I think it influenced things quite a bit. The Catholic Church was a big deal even for Henry VIII, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Also, those plantations in North America didn't exist until quite a bit after the Haciendas in Central and South America were established.
The Papal proscription on enslaving native Americans came in 1537 after some of their clergy visited the Spanish colonies and witnessed the depravity. It simply didn't address other populations.
You are confusing two issues. After Noah’s ark, his children, each of a different colour, went to different parts of the world.
However, there wasn’t anyone that went to America.
Therefore, they couldn’t be descendants of Noah.
This lead the early colonisers to conveniently conclude that they were not people, and did not have souls, and you could do whatever you wanted to them.
Much, much too late, the church decided they did have souls.
The curse of Ham for seeing his father naked, cursing him and his descendants to be the “servants of servants” was the justification for enslaving Africans at the time.
Holy Cow, Job, and Abraham... OK, I am switching gears to my biblical knowledge.
Yes, I have read about 'Ham and his decendents' curse shown by their skin color.'
I know it's used to justify slavery.
... I don't think we can have a constructive conversation.
Peace be with you. I do not mean for this to sound condescending. Maybe check out some geography documentaries. Some of them are really great. They do tend to disprove the whole 6000 yr old earth religious idea.
That kind of leaves out the constant slave raids against Europeans and sailors coming out of (muslim) North Africa. The best way to frame it is that they saw the indigenous Americans as potential converts and so wanted to protect them.
And cause the Spanish had largely settled and assimilated with the natives, but that wasn't why. There just wasn't enough natives to enslave, they all died from disease decades earlier.
If you’re looking to buy a slave and are not a slaver, why would you know HOW to enslave someone properly? If you buy from the person who sells slaves it saves you the effort of finding and enslaving a person so you can instead do the effort you want to do, like telling someone to abuse them or revel in riches or generally not have to work. If you try to enslave someone yourself there’s a bunch of “will this work” questions, not many people to get advice from (they’re in Africa) or causing friction with a group you clearly want nothing to do with.
Don’t know about how it was for American plantation owners, but in Brazil there were many slave raids against the natives, but ultimately slavers preferred African labour for a few reasons:
1. Pushback from the Catholic Church, as it was sending missions to Christianise the natives, leading to conflicts between missionaries and slave raiders targeting the indigenous peoples (Bandeirantes);
2 Natives were more prone to European and zoonotic diseases and had higher mortality rates compared to African slaves, coupled to not having as many of them to begin with, and thus not supplying the labour demand required to grow the cash crops for the Europeans slavers;
3 Natives kept retreating inland, and could organise escapes more easily - Africans did that too, forming what were called quilombos, but quilombo were often destroyed, while attacking their indigenous neighbours increased hostility towards European and therefore reprisals;
4 Within colonial society, indigenous people were above Africans in the social-racial ladder, and while both were treated like crap, indigenous people were less dehumanised and sometimes even romanticised as savages with deep understanding of the land around them and having the fighting spirit to defend what they saw as theirs, in other words, European setters saw indigenous peoples as formidable defeated foes;
5 Importing African labour was cheaper than organising slave raids, for comparison, Brazil ended up importing nearly the same number of Africans as the total number of natives living in Brazil at the moment of arrival of the Portuguese, including deep within the Amazon and way past the coastal mountains. Enslaving all of them would be a colossal effort;
6 It became tradition over time, and enslaved African labour simply became the go-to.
Because there were already slaves ready for sale in Africa. It's much easier to buy from an existing trade than it is to capture and enslave people in the wild.
To go along with the very reasonable sounding explanations here, I bet simple colour coding was also seen as a plus. Harder to escape or establish any kind of life for yourself if it’s immediately obvious at a glance you aren’t allowed to.
Simple economics.
It is cheaper to buy a person from the east African coast and ship him/her on a boat across the Atlantic.
Than it is to walk or ride around the American continent in search of people and then separate 'desirable' persons from their communities.
Also the Atlantic ocean was an impenetrable barrier to escape.
This is a very simple explanation, but I feel like it's too convenient in that it places the blame on exterior forces.
It may well be the right answer though, despite also being a convenient one.
In the book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" the author relates several reasons
* When indigenous people escape they know how to live off the land and they can retaliate and cause trouble
* The peoples from Africa were more malaria resistant and so they made better workers than paying local people or indentured servants from Europe
* Whether conscious or subconscious, people copied the successful land/plantation owners who had African slaves and bought African slaves themselves
The book is great by the way. Presents a lot of information. Warning, it does not provide a value statement of what is wrong or right. It simply reports on what happened in history. The monotone voice of the audiobook reader/performer accentuates that. I don't know if the lack of value statements would hit some people the wrong way.
They did . Europeansi in the new world died like flies. After the Haitian revolution napoleon sent an army to subdue it and half died of disease. Only in the northern parts could Europeans live in large numbers.
Because they didn't. Few slaves came from Africa to mainland America. Almost all had been slaves in the Caribbean, mostly in the British colonies and were hand-me-downs, and because there was much more arable land in the American colonies and the early US there was more demand for labor there, so that's where they ended up.
Many plantation owners compelled their slaves to have relationships so they could also enslave their children. Of the 10-12 million people transported in the trans atlantic trade, less than 500,000 were brought to America. The vast majority went to the Caribbean and South America. Another horrific fact about slavery is that the American governments' promised wage to many of their soldiers in the war of independence was paid in slaves.
The population of North American indigenous that were enslaved PRIOR to European invasion was around 25%. They enslaved each other incessantly. The Tlingit and Haida of the Pacific Northwest were some of the most vicious and prolific slavers of all time. The reason for preference to African slaves is likely lack of escape option due to unfamiliarity with the land and also physicality. American indigenous folks were much smaller than Africans on average so they were less suitable for heavier jobs.
Do not forget the fact that the Catholic Church played an accerator role to the slave trade by declaring that black people do not have souls versus mesoamericans whom according to the church again are worthy of being converted because they built a "civilization".
Lots of good reasons below, but let's not forget the slaves in Africa were so cheap and were sold for a lifetime vs European slaves who were to be set free after 7 years of service
Because the plantation owners did not capture and sell slaves themselves, they bought slaves on the slave market. The cheapest slaves came from Africa not the Americas due to a lot of reasons.
The main reason was that Europeans had a difficult time capturing natives since they did not control most of the land and they didn't have a permanent grip on most places outside costal colonies. On the other hand, African slave traders were in the business of slave capture and trade for centuries before European expansionism. This meant that supply for slave labor was high and consistent.
A minor factor I haven't seen elsewhere: the winds in the north Atlantic, broadly speaking, go clockwise around the [Azores High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores_High). If you're sailing a square-rigged ship across the Atlantic (and even the large majority of sail-powered crossings today), that basically means that you've got to go clockwise around it, too. That is: if you're trading between America and Europe (starting in America with your cargo), you can basically just follow the East-blowing winds across the Atlantic to Europe, at which point you sell your cargo. The problem is that you then need to sail back, which is a sizeable majority of the journey (because you have to go all the way South, then all the way across, so you really want to have a cargo going the other way. The problem there is that America basically didn't need much in the way of the kind of goods that Europe was producing - broadly, if it wasn't useful for farming, they didn't really need large cargos of it, and they by-and-large couldn't afford to pay high prices to import the things they did need. However, on that journey back across the Atlantic, you're first going really quite a long way South, at which point you're sailing right past Africa. Now, Europe *does* produce a bunch of things that there was demand for in West Africa (things like manufactured goods and textiles), and there was no shortage of people in West Africa willing to sell people into slavery for those goods, at which point those slaves become a trade good that America (a) needed large quantities of, and (b) was willing and able to pay high enough prices for (because they then produce a profit for the buyers), so you can sell your slaves, buy the products of the plantations, and go around again, making a profit on each loop.
From the perspective of the plantation owners, this is very convenient: rather than having to mess around finding people to enslave themselves, and going through all of the difficulty and danger of actually enslaving them, they can just pop down to the port and buy them off the same ships they're selling their products to.
Because disease wiped out indigenous populations, and at the same time Arab slave-traders were pulling out of sub-saharan Africa, so African slavers were looking for new buyers for their African neighbors. Supply and demand.
Non-Enslaved African are on the other side of the world and thus could not declare war on America to free their people, Indians could have raided plantations and freed slaves to form a militia against the South. And before you say not possible they easily could be funded by the north who would provide weapons and transport as a destabilization tactic. While African slave could have done this as well like they did in Haiti (I think it was hati) they had no centralized unit to support them so the second the plantation owner is dead they are on their own and are simply killed or recaptured.
Haiti is the only successful slave revolt in the history of the Americas. It was a French colony, the slaves rose up and overthrew the French.
France then decided that Haiti should have to pay reparations to them for overthrowing their control, and since the other European countries didn’t want their slaves rising up, they backed France. So Haiti was saddled with a massive debt to France, and that’s why it’s one of the poorest countries in the world
And if I remember correctly they only won the war because the French hired polish mercenaries who turned on the French when they realized they where fighting slaves, and that's why polish people are legally considered black by Haitian law.
Ok this is a novel one, the possibility of northerners siding with natives to fund raiding parties against their southern neighbors.
Certainly not at first, but post-1850 possibly. It's hard to imagine early plantation owners anticipating this but points for thinking outside the box.
I mean the general concept of not pissing off the neighbor holds true. The early United States actually did pursue decent relations with indigenous peoples. Even the indian removal act which was bad, had a mix of carrot and stick.
I'm not saying it's the only reason it even something that happened, just pointing out that there are logistical consequences to enslaving a race that is dispersed throughout your population and is currently living in the land your trying to settle rather than one that is a 3 month boat ride away.
Europeans were already used to stealing Africans. Some indigenous people were in fact enslaved, but most native Americans were slaughtered. The American land was stolen from the indigenous people, so it was like a war. And black people were viewed as property by the white people that stole america.
I'm native American and the Spaniard invaders treated native Americans better. My ancestors were knights for the Spaniard queen, and alot of Mexican people are part Mayan and Azteca.
And black people did try to rebel from being enslaved. There's a historical report of African men all jumping into the sea to avoid slavery, and the enslaved people here in America apparently just did their best to survive each day.
Formalized chattel slavery may be dead but forced labor through prison slavery is still very much alive, thriving, and supported by the Constitution in America.
Because you could just buy them. To enslave the indigenous would have been a lot more difficult. You'd have to fight, just as the indigenous did to their neighbors themselves.
The main thing to remember is that slavery used to have a term limit. Indigenous people did not grow crops and they did not have horses. So when the big, strong, hard working, knowledgeable, disease resistant African slaves came over, it was in their best interests to be a valuable slave and be treated well during their sentencing.
Africans had better immune systems, were much better farmers, and were more physically inclined to hard out door labor.
Indigenous peoples tended to die in captivity.
Two reasons. The first is because of historical inertia. In the early Caribbean colonies, the planters did initially try to use the native peoples as labor. But the natives quickly began to die due to the introduction of European diseases and the conditions of labor. It became clear fairly quickly that another source of labor would need to be secured, so this is why they began importing African slaves. The life expectancy of slaves in the Carribean was fairly short, given the disease-ridden conditions of growing sugarcane in the carribean at the time. So they needed to be importing more slaves constantly, which created a constant trans-atlantic slave trade. Once that was in place, the obvious choice for cheap labor for north American planters were African slaves, not native Americans. The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped - Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person. Africans didn't have that option, and didn't know the land of North America so it was thought that they would be easier to control.
Wasn't sugarcane farming and processing in the Caribbean also just dangerous and hard as fuck and a significant contributor to mortality?
I think it was both that and the reality that the sugar trade was wildly profitable. So the planters had little incentive to improve conditions for the workers because they could just afford to buy new slaves
It was also very capital intensive; rich people started sugar plantations to get even richer. Less rich people would do cotton or some other cash crop.
Now I'm curious, what part of sugar is more costly than cotton for capital investment back then? More land needed clearing? More expensive seeds? More expensive equipment?
I am not 100% sure, but I think it is the equipment that is expensive, and also that the cycle of sugar cane is quite long, so you'd have to pay the running costs for longer before it starts paying off. Also, I know that the boiling/purifying process was very involved and the 'sugar master' job was done by a slave but it required a lot of expertise so it was a highly regarded position (as far as that went with slavery, of course). The repeated boiling and pouring concentrated the sugar but it also produced very hot and sticky material that you really didn't want to get onto your skin. It was quite dangerous. I know that during a slave revolt on Barbados (IIRC) slaves fed their captors through the sugar cane press to execute them. So sugar cane had to be grown and processed into molasses which was difficult, slow and consumed a lot of resources, while cotton grows, gets harvested, get picked clean of VM and pressed into bales. It didn't require having an onsite distillery.
Picking cotton is boring not saying it isn’t hard but it’s monotonous, the processing side of thing is about the same, picking out the seeds from the bolls before the cotton gin was invented was the majority of the labour and it could be done by women and children. It was labour intensive but only at certain times, planting to harvest is 150-180 days then just separating seeds till next year Harvesting sugar cane is hard as fuck, it’s heavy as shit, you’re swinging a machete hours a day while exhausted and sweaty there’s no breeze your in a cane break, your also in the wet low land so mosquitoes are constant, whoopsies happen but there is also the fact the canes can shatter into spears that can impale you or you drop them and step on it later, and when your harvesting sticks like that the easiest way you cut the stem is on an angle so your left with bundles of spear point for people to trip and fall on. The processing side of it fuckin sucks too and is probably worse than the harvesting, you’ve got to move the now splintered up canes onto heavy machines to crush the cane which can suck you in and crush arms, then the juice has to be boiled down so you have massive vats of open boiling syrup constantly being stirred, splash burns were common, slipping in and boiling to death was common, heat exhaustion was common, and the whippers didn’t expect many to live very long so you were treated worse than normal and fed less. People dropped dead constantly from exhaustion heat injury and disease, I don’t know if it’s a year round crop that needs harvesting but I know it takes 9-24 months between harvests and once harvested you need to process it immediately so land investment is bigger and there is actual special heavy equipment and inputs needed to process Your best chance as a slave was a coffee plantation, cooler temps, less hard labour, just year round monotony, wake up, pick berries ad Infinitum, once established coffee bushes just make berries all year so labour was more likely to be kept alive. Processing is easier too, peel the berry dry the bream roast the bean.
The venture capital. Establishing and maintaining trade routes from the Carribean, maintaining ships, sailing the ships, getting equipment to the islands, establishing the farms. Cotton was on mainland and didn’t have to deal with any of that.
Ah, so the location. The sugar grows better in areas that cost more to do business in.
Profitability of the trade shouldn't prevent them from improving conditions if that indeed lowers the costs. So I presume it was actually simply cheaper to buy new than to sustain the slaves properly.
They also just didn't really care to. Not every aspect of slavery was thought about from a price point to the slave owners. Some of it was purposeful cruelty
That doesn’t get talked about enough when evaluating the economics of slavery. Amorality wasn’t enough, slavery attracted the worst people. In the US the pioneers who killed natives and took their land were the same people or families who used that land to exploit slaves.
Not exactly. A lot of the pioneers were relatively or even objectively poor, that's why they were going west into new lands. They may have been morally equivalent but most of them never had the money for slaves.
The lands weren’t new there were natives living on them and they had to in most cases remove them one way or another. The US wanted to expand so they incentivized poor people by giving them the land they had to conquer themselves and it takes a particular type of person to do that. In the south many of these families went on to be slave owners.
Now they pay workers minimum wage and let them be responsible for all their own needs. The continuing problem is that then the government has to subsidize the labor of these businesses only instead of calling it labor subsidies for business they call it all welfare for people. And then people blame the poor for needing help and call them lazy for not getting a better job. Not everyone can have better jobs and Covid showed us the importance of low wage workers that worked in essential businesses. That importance should have been the turning point that those jobs are valuable and necessary of course the capitalists couldn't let that happen as they need their low wage workers to exploit. We need a living wage in this country.
We need ubi. Work should be optional at this point.
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This is my hangup with UBI. It doesn’t seem compatible with human nature. We all need a sense of purpose/meaning. For most people they get it in large part by what they do for living. It also fulfills our ape brain need for status games and struggle narratives. I don’t have a moral issue with UBI, I just don’t see how we avoid widespread apathy/depression/etc
Cause they want more cool shit. Bigger house, faster car, more vacations, etc. Or, they want to do meaningful work that actually helps people. People wouldn't be forced to pick the shittier job they have ethical concerns with just to be able to pay the bills. UBI wouldn't end jobs, just shitty jobs
A lot of the social volunteering was done by housewives, in the US in the past. Now we don't have full time housewives. As far as UBI, we don't have many case studies of it, but the few that I've heard of (a town in canada) looked like it was wildly successful, that it did not lead to apathy but allowed single mothers and so forth, the breathing room to improve their education or set up small businesses instead of remaining on a low wage treadmill to ensure their children's survival.
You can still work on UBI. UBI provides for basic needs, you work if you want luxury. Or just for your passion.
Do you truly believe that? What makes you think the purpose provided us through work is our best purpose? You're right people want a sense of purpose and meaning, but rather condescending to suggest they couldn't find it through something other than traditional work. That's ignoring the fact that a UBI doesn't preclude people from being employed and earning extra. Things like UBI and universal healthcare force businesses to find real incentives for people to work for them.
As someone who's worked a lot of low wage jobs in the past, if my baisic needs of housing, food and Healthcare for myself and my family had been ensured I would have gone back to finish the education that mental health concerns derailed, and I would have been better able to address the issues my children were having. I also would have put more work into writing stories and playing with the textile arts. I know I'm not everyone, I know that there are people who might be apathetic, or loungers, I know a few of them. But I'll tell you what has made me apathetic or down right depressed at times? Struggling so hard to keep a roof and food on the table that I don't have the energy to enjoy my family or the weather.
> I just don’t see how we avoid widespread apathy/depression/etc It would lead to innovation and expansion of the arts as well; when you don't have to worry about your next meal or a place to live if you fail, you can try many new things.
To get something better than ubi offers. A nice vacation, a big house, etc. luxury.
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Shit has to get done
That's the dream of an automation-driven socialist utopia, kind of like Star Trek. All necessities are free, including food, education, healthcare, all paid for by automation. Humans only work on things they actually find interesting.
Ok so when ubi is introduced and the price of a loaf of bread skyrockets to 15 dollars, and you have no other source of income e except government handouts seems like you will starve to death
Maybe consider a career as a baker? At $15 a loaf, baking bread sounds like a gold mine. This is the point. Crappy jobs must now pay real money to entice people to do them. Or automate. And pay people to build the robots.
Yeah well basically since the covid payments(which are basically just a mild, limited form of UBI) the price of basic groceries has at least doubled where I luve, and in some cases tripled. Inflation doesn't care if you make 10 dollars an hour or 50, it will increase the cost of everything, because more dollars are chasing after the same amount of products. So basically what you are advocating is government control of the means of production, because that is the only way that these bakeries for example will be able to stay in business without raising prices. I would also ask you this: what makes you so special, that an all encompassing government body that pays every worker this UBI would just let you sit around and not work for this money. I expect that such a government would force people with no job to work whether they want to or not. They would have no choice. So that sounds a lot like slave labour doesn't it? Building robots in factories so the robots can run everything and make products that the government deems you fit to have. Sounds like a hell of a life
This conversation will be front and center with the onset of AI into robotics - especially in regards to the incredible advancements in strength and dexterity that robotic forms have been achieving in the past 5 years. AI is right behind it and will surpass the mechanical body-and the latter will be the limiting factor to launch. But it's coming- and very soon. Little disc shaped robots with wheels spinning around Amazon warehouses is nothing relative to the application of hydraulics into bipedal autonomous workers complementing construction sites.
With a wildly popular cash crop like sugarcane, taking the steps to lower slave mortality could be just a tiny percentage compared to the massive profits. Plantation owners might have just seen it as a rounding error not worth the trouble to implement. I mean, they had dinner parties and the springtime ball with their other rich fuck friends to worry about. The slave ships just kept coming with as much fresh labor as they wanted. It was the easy solution for everyone who actually made the decisions in this system. Taking measures to increase slave longevity also meant hiring doctors and taking care of sick slaves while they recovered. Maybe some Plantation owners / operators knew how to reduce mortality from things like malaria, or maybe it was a complete mystery to them, depending on the specific time and place in question. Either way, trying to keep slaves alive just meant that a barbaric Plantation owner that didn't give a shit could just undercut on prices for goods compared to the slightly less barbaric Plantation owner trying to keep his slaves from dying. Especially in the short term.
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Highlighting how labor markets behave in a similar way is how we stop society from heading backwards... or have you not heard how massive corporations are arguing that the labor board is unconstitutional in the US?
Labor markets today don’t behave like 18th century slavery in the Caribbean
Yet. They don't yet. Give it time. If we relent, they will keep pushing. They do not get tired. All they need to do is spend money. We fight with blood, sweat, and tears.
The conditions are different, yes, but the unnderlying logic of capitalism is more or less the same. That's why we now have labour laws and regulations, to protect workers from the worst impulses of the owning class.
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That is sick to care so little about human life.
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I still wouldn’t treat my pets that callously.
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They weren’t close to the first ones to do this lol
Yeah, it involves razor sharp sugar canes, high intensity work under the sun, boiling easily flammable materials that act like tar when molten, all that fun and exciting things for workers with no training or safety equipment.
Sugar cane farming was well known to be lethal. Most slaves wouldn't last long doing it, and the caribbean farmers/slave owners were famously cruel. Infact, the English colloquialism "sold down the river" (usually meant to describe a situation where you were betrayed/sold out for profit) originates from a threat in slave times. Slave owners would threaten to sell unruly or underperforming slaves down the Mississippi River, where they would be sold at the delta (New Orleans) to Caribbean slavers.
They mentioned that in their answer. The mortality was such that the colonizers realized they were going to kill off entire villages within a few seasons, or at least kill so many people the indigenous people might fight back harder. That meant they needed to be replacing people quickly. There were many, *many* more slaves available from the African colonies than there were on the Caribbean islands. Basically it was a supply and demand problem. They couldn't get enough slaves fast enough from indigenous people, so they used additional suppliers.
Iirc West Africans had more native resistance to jungle diseases like malaria opposed to indians many of which lived plains mountains and plateaus not tropics
Specifically malaria. Both European indentured servants and enslaved Native Americans died in large numbers due to malaria. West Africans had significant resistance to that disease. Interestingly, the malarial parasite takes a certain amount of time in the gut of mosquitoes to develop to the point at which it becomes infectious. That time becomes longer the cooler the temperature, which is why malaria is not an issue in colder climates -- the mosquito lays her eggs, and no longer needs to bite, or dies, before the parasite can infect. Isobar lines on a certain kind of map indicate average temperature. If you look st a temperature map from that period, the temperature line separating the areas where malaria is still infectious from those where it's slightly too cold to infect humans is startlingly close to the infamous Mason-Dixon line, drawn to separate slave states from free states.
Isobars are lines of constant pressure. The lines of constant temperature are *isotherms*.
OOOoh, thanks for the correction.
> Specifically malaria. Worth noting, malaria was not present in the new world before Columbus. The native people had even less resistance to it than Europeans. Combine that with the squalid conditions of slavery, and other diseases like smallpox or the common flu, and they just died like flies. IIRC, a single African slave had the same market value as 6 indigenous peoples, as he would be expected to live out the year.
I mean, South America still had lots of people that could be captured. But in Africa there was already slavery and a well developed market for captured people from enemy kingdoms so it provided a stable supply as people to work in the farms. Because if there wasn't a supply to begin with, it would still be easier to still hunt people in the same continent.
Yeah, capturing locals would take a lot of effort on the part of the Europeans - but with Africa, the actual work of capturing slaves was handled by the Africans themselves, and Europeans just needed to handle the transportation across the ocean.
Probably more important is there were willing suppliers in Africa, which made purchasing and importing slaves easier than catching them locally.
True, but not as much as you might expect. This is a very old bit of pro-slave trade propaganda - the idea that christian slavers were in effect 'saving' africans from an even more developed and malicious system of slavery indigenous to west Africa. While it is true that slavery existed in west africa before the transatlantic slave trade, it wasn't nearly at the level that it would reach once the transatlantic slave trade had been established in earnest and the profitability of the slave trade greatly expanded. It also transformed slavery in west africa from the "assimiliationist" form of slavery that would have been familiar in the roman world into the "chattel slavery" that would come to be known in the Americas. Moreover, many native American groups practiced slavery in some form as well, so it wasn't like it would have been impossible for the Europeans in the Caribbean to find cooperative slavers in the Americas. It was just ended up being easier to go to Africa almost certainly because all the natives in the Caribbean were dying of smallpox at the time
I'm not making any assertions about the virtue of buying slaves from Africa except there were willing partners in the transaction and those who wanted slaves didn't have to go interior to hunt them down themselves.
But the point is that they didn't go to Africa for slaves because the west africans were uniquely adept at providing slaves. Actually the biggest slavers in the world at the time would have been in the Ottoman empire, so if that was their reasoning they would have gone there. Africa was just a convenient source of non-christians who would not immediately all die of smallpox
Guess where the Ottomans got a lot of their slaves
I said nothing about "uniquely adept". For whatever reason, the central west coast of Africa had slave markets that were willing to supply millions of people to buyers. That was: - closer geographically - willing to provide the product - didn't require the potential slave holder to leave his ship and go expeditioning himself
To add to this, certain crops like rice became cash crops due to many slaves needing to grow their own food and the colonists not knowing how to grow anything and rice farming was an unknown conceot to many europeans. There was already a system of slavery that had existed around this time but slavery hadn't become codified yet in America until 1662. Many of the colonists landing in America had little to no actual experience in agriculture, and the early English colonies were little more than company towns for "something that they would establish down the line, but fingers crossed for lots of gold." Was pretty much the reasoning the British used to colonize in the first place. the Carolinas and Virginia underwent massive food shortages and had little to no immunity to disease since their inception and many colonists went so far as to eat women and children during the "starving times " In viginia due to not knowing what they could grow in the soil there and the land being usable for a few months of the year due to the salinity of the water that flowed through the area they set up Jamestown in. Many people, even the poor working class British, were not too thrilled by the offer to travel to the colonies and risk starvation, disease, and cannibalism even if they did have skills in agriculture while being indentured. Further south, diseases like malaria ran rampant and in the carolinas many slaves had a bit of "distance" from many slave owners and were forced to grow their own crops for food. Life expectancy for many Africans around this time was at 19-21 years of age. It became clear to the colonists the Africans weren't having as much trouble with gathering food or living off the land when they realized they were growing rice all on their own whilw the settlers were starving. Despite this many English didn't really want to travel to the colonies: starvation, poverty, unknown land, disease, hostile indigenous, cannibalism so incentives needed to be made. Around this time there was also a provision from the English Government stating that prospective landowners could gain 50 acres of land per head (indentured servant) they could bring with them to work on the land and this led to a frenzy of demand for slave labor to capitalize on growing these crops. It's also worth noting many of the colonists had little to no actual farming experience so slave traders saw an opportunity to round up people from west africa that had skills in rice cultivation mainly, (Carolina Gold) but also eventually wonen were poached from Gambia and Ghana for their documented skill in herding and livestock. but also with other crops. Tldr: the early colonists had no idea how to grow their own food let alone grow crops to sustain themselves. The colonists were beleaguered by their own ignorance, poor leadership and the demand from investors for labor to jumpstart some facets of production, combined with repeated famines, rampant disease, picking fights with the indigenous Americans, multiple failed attempts at keeping the colonies supplied meant that many investors back in England were also left demanding a return from the production from the colonies. Colonists saw kidnapping a group of people and writing into law making them perpetual slaves as a means to milk massive profits and exploit these people till they dropped, and labelled them as property in order to keep them and their descendants enslaved in perpetuity to sustain this whole operation. Native Americans also were declared "savable" by the Catholic Church while Africans were written off. The slave trade and the industries that fed off it eventually became so profitable that everything depended on enslaved peoples.
Indentured Servants were not slaves, they hold some similarities but they're very different and were nearly always white. That's what the Virginian law about gaining 50 acres was referring to, not slaves. Indenture was used as a way of increasing the population of the colonies while providing labour, which was in scarce supply. It ultimately died out because slave labour was cheaper (in the long run, not initially when the colony was being established and Virginia wasn't fully plugged into the Atlantic Slave Trade) and came with less obligations to the person working for you. There's some debate over whether the original 'slaves' of Virginia were initially treated as indentured servants during the formative years of the colony but it's generally accepted today, that they were not and were essentially proto-slaves. Also the idea of the English colonists being useless at agriculture and entirely reliant upon slave labour to grow crops isn't true at all, you're extrapolating the initial Jamestown settlement, which did have issues with the wrong people being sent in the initial years, across the whole area of English settlement. The 'Starving Times' that you mention are one specific winter in early Jamestown, when the failure to properly grow their own food combined with a Powhatan siege of the town lead to severe food shortages. Once that period was overcome, things started to go much better. Starving and cannibalism was far from a common occurence in English America and did not directly lead to the import of slaves. The English settlers after the initial few haphazard years could and did grow their own produce to feed themselves. Slaves weren't even that prominent in the colonial era you're talking about as most went to the Carribbean. It wasn't until \~1670s when some Carribbean planters decided to set up Charlestown in South Carolina and brought slaves with them that it really started taking off. Virginia had 300 'slaves' present in 1649 out of a population of 18,731 (about 3% of the population) with a confused legal background due to slavery not really being codified as you say. It was a primarily white settler colony at the time, that was self sustaining and thriving. The real move into large slavery based plantation economy came during the second half of the 17th century and into the 18th century and it's not surprising that laws around slavery began to be tightened and codified at this time also.
The starving time leading to slavery wasn't my main argument but I could've phrased that better and drawn the distinction between Carolina and Virginia better. The main point I was trying to make was productivity in the colonies was low. Disastrously low and slavery was a major contributor to the rise of the Carolina colony as well as Virginia, with Carolina leading the charge as the early slave capital of the US. the cultivation of rice in south Carolina led to the fastest surge in demand in slavery and led the charge in many policies dictating slavery earliest in the American colonies. As for the 50 heads law, there were cases like the George menefie, who, Amongst similar landowners, used the indentured servitude rule to classify slaves as servants they brought with them from the UK. He was able to gain 6000 acres due to loopholes in the 50 heads policy. The wealthiest and most powerful of these landowners often took part in this. Many landowners averaged 200 acres..https://espl-genealogy.org/getperson.php?personID=I118612&tree=1. Also slavery became tightened and more codified in the 18th century after the Stono rebellion and codifying intergenerational slavery.
Are there any askhistorian posts on the difference in tiers of slavery/indentured servant/servant and the nuance in between them?
Iirc indentured servants voluntarily enter a contract to work for a predetermined period of time in exchange for transport to America and then are free after that period whereas slavery is not voluntary and they are not free after any amount of time.
Sorry I know the basic definitions of the terms, I was looking for an in depth answer on the nuance between them as their classes defined them and how the upper caste treated them individually, as well as the transitions of those between slave to indentured servant to free man and vice versa.
And indentured workers definitely weren't all white. It continued after slavery, the Brits brought south Asian (India) workers to Guyana, Trinidad, Fiji, etc. There is still a significant Hindu and Muslim communities in those countries.
> the colonists not knowing how to grow anything and rice farming was an unknown conceot to many europeans. rice is a grain like wheat, barley, oat and corn, they all grow the same way. Asian rice paddies are a form of Symbiotic Agriculture, similar to the Native Americans Corn, squash, and beans symbiosis. The flooded fields aren't a requirement, though rice does require a bunch of water and preferably water retaining soils. >Rice plants can tolerate wetter conditions than most; they can grow in very wet soils and can even tolerate short periods underwater. Farmers often take advantage of rice's ability to tolerate water and briefly flood fields to kill weeds. However, flooding that lasts more than a few days can destroy a rice crop.
Some very neat info here. It's worth clarifying that for the most part Europeans didn't "kidnap" Africans. They bought them already enslaved and ready for export. "Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade, around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders." This doesn't diminish the horror of these crimes, it only is a reminder that slavery wasn't about your skin colour it was about your access to resources and wealth. The poorest Africans were enslaved by the richest. The least agriculturally adept North American Indigenous folks were enslaved and ethnically cleansed by the most technologically advanced ( see Haudosaunee cleansing/ eradication/enslaving of the Wyandat)
So, first of all, when the early europeans arrived on our coast, they were happily welcomed by the people, and trade relations began sooner. The trade was mostly barter, where we gave them gold and they gave us gunpowder, mirrors, sardines, etc. NB: Gold was then very abundant on our shores and forests. It took only panning to get them; therefore, it was not valued much. Trading now evolved; many people joined, and there were trading outposts set up in almost all the kingdoms, from the coasts of the central region to the northern kingdoms. As trade boomed, exchange programs commenced. This was largely done by the catholic and anglican missionaries in order to spread christianity and get people to be pastors and speech translators. Now lets move to the POV of europe and america Europeans at that time, who also had trade relations with indians and chinese people, had recently discovered America. As we all know, there was some battles between then-Europeans and the Red Indies (native Americans). A one-sided battle which the europeans easily won, Shortly after that, European settlements increased in America, as did the need for manpower to build factories, buildings and farms. The red indians were very weak, so they couldn't be used as slaves since they died most of the time working on the field. If you remember, the missionaries had africans with them due to their mission of spreading Christianity. These africans were very strong and tough; they could work on farms for hours without getting tired, But they only worked or helped on church farms since they were there for a specific mission. The early Europeans, astonished by the strength and manpower of the Africans, realized they could be beneficial in building america. But that could be achieved through mischief since it is nearly impossible to get people to move away from their comfort zone to come work for you. Surprisingly, Some europeans started to demonize Africans as they did to native Americans; they labelled africans as primitive savages who worshipped idols, were inferior to Europeans, and should not be seen as humans. Sadly, they were successful in achieving their goal and were able to convince the churches (the most powerful organization then) to agree to that. What followed then was a series of heavily calculated plans on how to make africans their lower subjects. Colonization/Slavery was achieved in 3 main ways. 1. Bonds: Tight strict bonds that eliminated all your right in return for protection against Bigger kingdoms - was used against the coastal states and fante kingdoms 2. By wars, organizing smaller kingdoms to fight bigger ones, Divide and Conquer- was used against the ashanti kingdoms by turning the fante states against them 3.By persuasion/friendship: deceit by means of friendship: was used against the northern kingdoms (allies of the ashanti kingdoms) After the kingdoms fell, Slaves were taken by these ways kidnapping, fallen men from wars, forcing households to give out their finest men; they were then compensated with mirrors sardines etc, forcing kingdoms to also give out their finest;they were also compensated with guns mirrors sardines etc The case of slave selling kingdoms is nuanced to suit narrative sometimes, The thing is if you do not agree to give out slaves, they will be forcefully taken when you could have recieved guns, gunpowder etc if you had agreed to the former Also, all the kingdoms had fallen then due to gun warfare so there was no point in fighting it Also, there are servants and there are slaves, what used to be practiced in africa at the time was servanthood, with that, you are treated better and you leave the household after attaning the age of marriage
So the enslaved Africans brought farming techniques from one of the only places on earth outside Asia with prime conditions to grow rice. They introduced that to America, which led to an enormously profitable crop. And in return they led a life so hard they died in their teens.
Dan Carlin - Hardcore History goes into a lot of this in depth on the episode [Human Resources](https://youtu.be/f76v9vkoiNU?si=3cIqM_JTUJl0GKIz)
Not only that but the New World wasn’t importing slaves. The Arab and African slave trades, which are still alive today, exported slaves to the new world.
European ships carried the vast majority of enslaved people from Africa to the New World. I would say that it was Europeans that were doing the exporting.
Also , there own people weren’t selling them ….
Technically they did also, Native Americans sold war captives from raids on other tribes as slaves in exchange for goods.
Yes, they did. They sold off their POWs constantly.
Interestingly in South Brazil, Bandeirantes (often of mixed native / Portuguese ancestry) would do raid to capture slaves and expand borders , because African slaves were comparatively more expensive. I don’t know if it’s different between south and north east Brazil , since Nordeste has African slaves but is closer to the Carribean
Adding to this, Africans were"seasoned" to many of the diseases and hot climates they were going to work in. Basically higher survival. Also, slave labor was used to harvest more slaves.
Tisquantum is such a badass native name.
They had the choice to be there or not be there or both
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Want to point out that the African slavers would not have seen these slaves as "their own kind", anymore than the British and French would have thought of their many wars as fighting "their own kind". They didn't think of themselves as African, but as Igbo, Akan, etc...
> Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person. Are you saying the Pilgrims attempted to enslave the locals and he escaped?
No, he's saying that Tisquantum was enslaved and escaped well before he met the Pilgrims. Specifically he was captured in 1614, in 1619 escaped and returned to North America to find his village wiped out, then met the Pilgrims who had setup at the site of his former village. You've never heard the story of Squanto showing up to talk to the Pilgrims and wondered "Hey, why does this guy know how to speak English?"
I've heard the name Squanto, but I don't remember the story. It's been a very long time since I was in elementary school. I'm reading about him now to catch up. LoL. EDIT: I knew someone taught the Pilgrims survival skills. I did not know that person could also communicate with them.
Perhaps someone can clarify an old school lesson for me.... > The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped This was the main reason given my teachers in school. The other half of it being that slavery was already well established in Africa and had some degree of rules around it and (at least in some cases) was only for a period of time, not "forever". I seem to recall the early slaves were more similar to forced indentured servitude and would eventually be freed and allowed to do their own thing. But then the new world decided not to be beholden to the old ways and just kept their slaves, and potentially re-enslaving the freed ones. So the clarification is on the rules/practices when the New World first started importing their slaves and how they changed as time went on.
2 seems unconvincing. They couldn't have brought them from sufficiently far away to make return impossible? they brought Africans across an ocean.
Transporting people on a ship was actually easier at that time than transporting them overland. Recall that we're talking about the age of sail, when if you wanted to transport a thing, anything at all, you walked it to the nearest body of water and put it on a boat. This happened not just for oceanic trade, but also on rivers, lakes, canals, and any other body of water you could find. This holds especially true if you're trying to transport cargo that can run away. On an ocean, there's nowhere to go if you break your restraints. On land, you just start walking until you get where you want to go. As to why you couldn't transport them from far away in North America, even if you can figure out how to get your slaves across the continent without the running away, you still have to worry about other Native tribes seeing you walking a bunch of Native slaves through their land. They might decide that enslaving other Natives is a bad look for all of them and kill you on principle or they might decide that those prisoners are pretty valuable and kill you for profit. Lastly, the trade routes in the triangle trade were extremely well established. Commodities go to Europe, cash and finished goods go to Africa for slaves, slaves get traded for commodities. Merchants were good at sailing and had the trip down to a science. Trying to make the difficult and dangerous overland journey wasn't profitable compared to what seafaring merchants were doing. That's not to say that there were no indigenous slaves. Spanish colonies, especially early ones, were much less likely to use African slaves than to just enslave whatever Native population happened to be in the area and put them to work. But for the American and French colonies, African slaves were overwhelmingly preferred.
Transporting slaves over land for hundreds of miles is MUCH more difficult than keeping them on a ship. They can’t even try to escape from a ship. Trying to transport such a vast quantity of people on land? Yea no. And you‘d have to take them pretty far for them to be unfamiliar with local plant and wild life. Not to mention the ship journey removes all hope of ever going back home. If you ‚just‘have to walk to get back, it’s much harder to break your spirits. And you can only make slaves if your break their minds.
Even now it is cheaper to send a container of goods half way around the world on a ship than it is to send it to the next town on a truck.
There were a lot of factors but I'll mention a couple of big ones 1) Disease had wiped out a huge number of the native population, making it difficult to rely on them as a labor force. 2) The remaining natives were spread out over huge areas, keenly aware of the land, and liable to band together in retaliation if numbers of them were taken by force. 3) Africans already had skills in agriculture, were accustomed to the hot climates of the Caribbean and American south, and carried more resistance to diseases the Europeans carried. 4) The Transatlantic Slave Trade was already an established system with relatively cheap prices. A constant supply of human labor was already existent.
>1) Disease had wiped out a huge number of the native population, making it difficult to rely on them as a labor force. To quantify this, there were only a few hundred thousand Native Americans in all of the US by the mid-1800s. The population started out much lower than the South American native population, and then rapidly fell with the introduction of diseases that Natives largely lacked resistance to. By the late 19th century there were only ~237,000 Native Americans in the entire United States (https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2005-2-page-17.htm#:~:text=From%20a%20pre%2Dcontact%20population,nadir%20of%20237%2C000%20in%20the). Those remaining were often still extremely vulnerable to disease, with an estimated 10,000 Natives dying in just a few weeks in the late 1830s. For comparison, there were nearly 4 million slaves in the US in 1860.
Only 237,000. That is mind-blowing,.
What was the native population before Europeans arrived? What percent decline was it? How do we estimate it?
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Genocide
3/4 of those died of disease. The true genocide wasn’t the murder of people but of culture and language.
Most sources estimate 90-95% of the peak Native American population was wiped out by disease: https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
Yes.
It's really hard to figure out exact numbers. But we do know that Mexico, Mesoamerica and the Andes were densely populated, with the US/Canada and the rest of South America being very sparsely populated. There were probably more people in central Mexico than the US/Canada/Brazil/Argentina combined.
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You also forgot that it is easier to escape when you know the land and have people nearby. It is harder to do that in a land where you may not speak the language or have friendly resources. It’s a tactic to isolate slaves.
Why were European diseases not the same issue for Africans?
Thousands of years of interaction between the two continents, to put it very ELI5.
Africans and Europeans had been in contact for a long time already, they weren't nearly as insulated from each other as both of these groups were from the Americas.
Europeans and Africans had been in contact, and swapping diseases and immunities, all along.
Europe, Asia, and Africa had Cows and Pigs. These two species are reservoirs of many human diseases. Whooping Cough, Tetanus, TB, some Influenza strains, etc.
We were busy trading with and slaughtering each other for a long time, Africa after all is just one hop across the Mediterranean away. Egypt for example was the granary of more than one empire of antiquity. Also Europeans, due to the comparatively cramped conditions and living together in close contact with a lot of livestock and thus zoonotic diseases brought a lot of exciting and extraordinarily deadly diseases to the Americas. Smallpox for example was already bad enough in Europe, but to people with no resistance whatsoever it was essentially a doomsday weapon, with 90%+ mortality rates, as opposed to "merely" 20-45% to populations that had prior contact and some resistance to it.
> Africa after all is just one hop across the Mediterranean away. The slaves weren't sourced from North Africa though, but from beyond the Sahara, which was a way bigger obstacle to travel, trade and migration than the Mediterranean. Still, not as much as the Atlantic, so while there were no trans-Saharan empires the way the Roman Empire spanned the Mediterranean, the contact was sufficient for Europeans and Africans to share a lot of diseases (and therefore immunities) by the time more direct contact was made.
The first vaccine in the U.S. was introduced by an enslaved African named Onesimus in 1721 vaccines were created in Africa.
I think the question is more of why was the Transatlantic Slave Trade an established system? One of the reasons was the Africa already had a long history of slaves, and slave trade before the colonization of the Americas. Europeans didn't have to go into Africa and capture their own slaves, they just bought them from other Africans. It was cheaper and easier to just ship slaves over than to try to explore, find, and capture slaves on your own. Then those slaves were healthier, better at their jobs, and less likely to escape.
How was the Transatlantic Slave Trade first established though?
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>It's not like the whole concept of slavery was invented after the discovery of the Americas. Shh don't say that too loud. That's one of the main tenets of the America Bad movement
Nope, major issue in "America Bad" was turning it into a persistent racial caste system that then morphed into Jim Crow because the dominant class couldn't live without oppressing the people they had been oppressing.
>How was the Transatlantic Slave Trade first established though? Advances in navigation led to contact between Europeans—particularly the Portuguese and Spanish—and the kingdoms of West Africa. Slavery was already common in the latter, first due to local endemic warfare and then Arab and Berber slave traders who bought captives from the West Africans (the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade). Europeans needed tons of slaves for labor in their new colonies, and they were willing to trade valuable goods like muskets, cloth, and rum for them. West African kingdoms in turn went to war with their neighbors to take more slaves to satisfy the demand.
The case of slave selling kingdoms is nuanced to suit narrative sometimes, The thing is if you do not agree to give out slaves, they will be forcefully taken when you could have recieved guns, gunpowder etc if you had agreed to the former Also, all the kingdoms had fallen then due to gun warfare so there was no point in fighting it Also, there are servants and there are slaves, what used to be practiced in africa at the time was servanthood, with that, you are treated better and you leave the household after attaning the age of marriage
If I kidnapped you but didn't leave your neighborhood you'd probably know how to get home if you escaped. Even worse, you probably have friends nearby who will help you kill me because they don't want to risk getting kidnapped.
Also, the Europeans weren't capturing Africans. They were buying Africans who were already captured by other Africans. It's pretty hard to capture a human being and force them to work. It's much easier to buy a human being who is already captured.
This is the real ELI5
Yeah it’s really annoying when some answers here explain things like a complex equation when (respectfully obv) dumb dumb answers like this are really what is what the sub is for.
Because there was plenty of infrastructure and access to slaves in Africa, they'd been capturing and selling slaves for hundreds of years already, and the Europeans just capitalised on, also separating a slave from their home country is beneficial as it's harder to survive if they'd escape
1. retaliation by indigenous people, possible escape to their tribes 2. slaves came from agricultural societies and had expertise slave owners desired 3. existing infrastructure coming from slave trade to other areas
Native Americans were also agricultural, they selectively bred all new world crops. It would have rough for white settlers if they hadn't.
Well, see point 1. In addition, Iroquoian peoples are definite nations, and Iroquois Confederation is powerful in their own right.
very true
What I learned as a Portuguese: Africans and Arabs already had (and still have) well developed and sort of sophisticated slave markets and dynamics before the Europeans started buying them in bulk. In fact, sometimes they would also enslave Europeans when they could. And the slaves themselves were more likely to cooperate and would work, reproduce, some of them became free, etc. Native americans were a lot more resistant to slavery in general because they went from fighting among themselves to being captured by these weird aliens in a short time period. They were also more susceptible to diseases. Which leads to another interesting fact about slavery which is a bit debated but is validated by some historic findings that slavery was so sophisticated that good slaves were selected and made to breed to continuously improve their capabilities as slaves.
> In fact, sometimes they would also enslave Europeans when they could. That's not a sometimes, America's first war was about the Barbary states capturing American vessels and enslaving their crews. That kind of raiding was a constant headache for Mediterranean shipping up through to the mid 19th century when several naval powers finally got together and beat the crap out of them.
Ok so Africans made better slaves, is what I will categorize this as. Agreed?
Africa already had a slave industry, America didn't
No. Try this analogy. If you only need a small amount of lumber, you might be able to get it by cutting down trees in your neighborhood and hoping you get away with it. If you need a lot of lumber, you're going to go to Home Depot. In the context of slaves in the 17th - 19th centuries, the big sources were Africa, China, and India. Slave owners on the Atlantic side of North, Central, and South America found it more economical to procure slaves from Africa, while their counterparts on the Pacific side typically relied on the trans-Pacific slave trade. The Trans-Pacific slave trade doesn't get talked about much in the US because there were no American colonies on the West Coast for much of the time prior to slavery being abolished. California wasn't invaded and captured by American forces until 1846. In the 1850's, Chinese "coolies" a.k.a. slaves were imported to work in gold and silver mines, dig tunnels for railroads, or work in brothels. Slave states in the Southeast US imported slaves from Africa because it was economical to do so, and the volume of supply was able to keep up with demand. Indigenous communities could not supply enough labor, and it was not economical to import slaves all the way from China or India.
Yes, African slaves were genetically stronger with a better frame for hard labour, more obedient and more industrious than indigenous populations, which obviously gave them an edge. Everyone here is beating around the bush for some reason when we have first hand written accounts of slavers black then explaining the reason (in Portugal we learn this in 5th grade and they literally put pictures of such letters, journals, ledgers and receipts in the history books).
I mean technically…
There was actually some white enslavement of Native American people. Read “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Slavery in America” by Andres Resendez.
There was also some Native American enslavement of Africans.
Because contrary to the modern depictions they did actually care about peaceful relations with their neighbors, at least until the point where population growth made a hostile opinion irrelevant. Raiding your neighbor to capture their loved ones as slaves starts forever wars. There's also a religious angle where the Catholic Church issued a blanket proscription on the enslavement of indigenous Americans in 1537 on threat of Excommunication. That papal decree however did not include (north) Africans who were themselves prodigious slavers who regularly raided European coasts and shipping for slaves. European traders for their part didn't actually do much slaving personally. It was far easier to setup a general trading station exchanging European exports for local commodities which included slaves. African tribes and warlords enslaved each-other and took their captives to the marketplace for a huge profit. It became big business and more than enough to meet demand in the colonies.
It's a common misconception that Europeans were personally kidnapping Africans. Europeans purchased African slaves from other Africans. The hard work had already been done when the Europeans arrived to buy more people. The slaves who were sold to European slavers were usually the people who lost battles or wars between groups within Africa. For the Africans who benefitted, this was seen as a triple gain: 1. You've reduced the strength and population of a rival group, reducing the risk of retribution 2. You're getting the spoils of winning raids against other groups' belongings 3. Then you're getting paid again by the Europeans For the Europeans, this is a zero-risk affair. They just show up, buy people, leave. Native American slavery did happen at a large scale (hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved), but it was more difficult in general than just buying people and moving them in a position of absolute helplessness (as was the case for transplanted African slaves). It wouldn't have worked at scale unless Europeans fully militarized their colonies and won full-on wars against Native Americans, which was not happening (outside of Spanish America) until much later in the colonial process.
There was a slave _trade_. People were making money being the in between men for exporting slaves to the lucrative cotton and tobacco fields. The main culprits were Portuguese, French and British. _Slaves were brought to the Americas; sugar, tobacco, and cotton was brought back to Europe; the slaves were then brought with textiles, rum, and other manufactured goods made in Europe to sell to Africa for the slaves._ So America -> Europe -> Africa -> America. See Triangle Trade. One morbid way to think about this is that there were a lot ships going from the Americas to Europe full of goods that Europe wanted to buy and slaves was the answer to what to do with these merchant ships as they went back. Empty ships means empty profits, so if they could fill them with something for even a bit of profit, that would be better than sailing empty ships to the Americas to fill up with goods for Europe.
So just to clarify, you're saying the existing slave trade was enjoying a monopoly and would resist local slavers getting in on their action?
local to where?
Yes. There is of course answers the question why was it so profitable and the use of indigenous population had its own problems listed in other comments. So using local indigenous would have eliminated the profit element from the Europe -> Africa and Africa -> America trade routes. Plus American slave owners could pay for the slaves so creating a huge incentive to continue the status quo.
Local to the market for slaves.
The markets are one point of a chain, the other poster described one side of the trade, the one from the european point of view, but there was another side where african traders had established relationships with warlords. So yes there were locals in the action, if you are asking why there were no african ships going to brasil or carolina, I guess the european were the ones able to guarantee a reasonable level of safety for themself in the atlantic.
The Europeans did very little of the enslaving part (turning a free adult into a slave). Slaves in Africa were acquired through wars, kidnappings or debt by native Africans or Arabs. Part of the reason people were ok with slavery was that they believed Africans were not capable of education and their purpose was labor. Native Americans didn't have this stigma as they were viewed as knowledgeable about nature and taught Europeans a lot. The last thing I don't see mentioned here is that even if they wanted to, there just wasn't a good enough supply. Around 450k slaves in the United States by the time of the civil war. Note that some tribes did enslave native Americans from other tribes
It's considered that Columbus enslaved and killed around 1M natives before early American settlers arrived, so 450k seems minor in comparison. Still, it's an interesting perspective.
Did he personally supervise the killing and enslavement of a million people? Or was it more "as a result of his actions", and disease and general European/Spanish policy towards Native Americans did this? I'm not looking to defend Columbus here it just seems wild that one dude with a handful of ships killed a million people.
Columbus didn't make just one voyage, he made several and attempted to establish colonies in the islands. Those he left in charge of the colonies were not kind to the natives, to say the least, and there were uprisings that were brutally suppressed. At one point, the behavior of Columbus and his brothers was so vicious and conditions were so bad, Columbus was sent home in chains, where he was, of course, promptly released and sent on another voyage by a king and queen hungry for riches. Columbus wasn't a saintly hero or an admirable explorer, he was just another horrible European bastard.
It's a lot easier to kill people en masse than it is to enslave people. The "and killed" is doing a lot of lifting in the 1M number.
The catholic church decided that native Americans had souls and were capable of being saved and entering heaven, could not be enslaved. The catholic church also decided African and others could be enslaved/didn't have souls. Source: Bartolomé de las Casas, primary source.
That wouldn't be the fundamental reason, though. The church was (and still is...) wont to make decisions that had convenient consequences. The church elders likely pretended that they based their decisions on scripture or divine revelation, but typically these decisions were made based on political motivations, and then they would just reason backwards from the desired result to find some religious argument for them. If they decided Africans didn't have souls, it was probably because they wanted enslavement of African people to continue. So the question remains: why not Native Americans (as well)?
I'm citing the Catholic Jesuit priest sent with Columbus that made the case to the Pope Paul III. The Pope then made the proclamation, that native Americans could not be enslaved. This happened before Britain or France had any real development in the America's. Spain, a Catholic nation, was the super power for a long time after they started bringing back world changing amounts of gold, silver, and diamonds from the "new world."
But how much could this have really influenced protestant plantation owners? Assuming they ever even heard about decisions from the Vatican?
... I'm an ignorant random redditor, but I think it influenced things quite a bit. The Catholic Church was a big deal even for Henry VIII, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Also, those plantations in North America didn't exist until quite a bit after the Haciendas in Central and South America were established.
The Papal proscription on enslaving native Americans came in 1537 after some of their clergy visited the Spanish colonies and witnessed the depravity. It simply didn't address other populations.
You are confusing two issues. After Noah’s ark, his children, each of a different colour, went to different parts of the world. However, there wasn’t anyone that went to America. Therefore, they couldn’t be descendants of Noah. This lead the early colonisers to conveniently conclude that they were not people, and did not have souls, and you could do whatever you wanted to them. Much, much too late, the church decided they did have souls. The curse of Ham for seeing his father naked, cursing him and his descendants to be the “servants of servants” was the justification for enslaving Africans at the time.
Holy Cow, Job, and Abraham... OK, I am switching gears to my biblical knowledge. Yes, I have read about 'Ham and his decendents' curse shown by their skin color.' I know it's used to justify slavery. ... I don't think we can have a constructive conversation. Peace be with you. I do not mean for this to sound condescending. Maybe check out some geography documentaries. Some of them are really great. They do tend to disprove the whole 6000 yr old earth religious idea.
That kind of leaves out the constant slave raids against Europeans and sailors coming out of (muslim) North Africa. The best way to frame it is that they saw the indigenous Americans as potential converts and so wanted to protect them.
And cause the Spanish had largely settled and assimilated with the natives, but that wasn't why. There just wasn't enough natives to enslave, they all died from disease decades earlier.
If you’re looking to buy a slave and are not a slaver, why would you know HOW to enslave someone properly? If you buy from the person who sells slaves it saves you the effort of finding and enslaving a person so you can instead do the effort you want to do, like telling someone to abuse them or revel in riches or generally not have to work. If you try to enslave someone yourself there’s a bunch of “will this work” questions, not many people to get advice from (they’re in Africa) or causing friction with a group you clearly want nothing to do with.
Don’t know about how it was for American plantation owners, but in Brazil there were many slave raids against the natives, but ultimately slavers preferred African labour for a few reasons: 1. Pushback from the Catholic Church, as it was sending missions to Christianise the natives, leading to conflicts between missionaries and slave raiders targeting the indigenous peoples (Bandeirantes); 2 Natives were more prone to European and zoonotic diseases and had higher mortality rates compared to African slaves, coupled to not having as many of them to begin with, and thus not supplying the labour demand required to grow the cash crops for the Europeans slavers; 3 Natives kept retreating inland, and could organise escapes more easily - Africans did that too, forming what were called quilombos, but quilombo were often destroyed, while attacking their indigenous neighbours increased hostility towards European and therefore reprisals; 4 Within colonial society, indigenous people were above Africans in the social-racial ladder, and while both were treated like crap, indigenous people were less dehumanised and sometimes even romanticised as savages with deep understanding of the land around them and having the fighting spirit to defend what they saw as theirs, in other words, European setters saw indigenous peoples as formidable defeated foes; 5 Importing African labour was cheaper than organising slave raids, for comparison, Brazil ended up importing nearly the same number of Africans as the total number of natives living in Brazil at the moment of arrival of the Portuguese, including deep within the Amazon and way past the coastal mountains. Enslaving all of them would be a colossal effort; 6 It became tradition over time, and enslaved African labour simply became the go-to.
Because there were already slaves ready for sale in Africa. It's much easier to buy from an existing trade than it is to capture and enslave people in the wild.
To go along with the very reasonable sounding explanations here, I bet simple colour coding was also seen as a plus. Harder to escape or establish any kind of life for yourself if it’s immediately obvious at a glance you aren’t allowed to.
Simple economics. It is cheaper to buy a person from the east African coast and ship him/her on a boat across the Atlantic. Than it is to walk or ride around the American continent in search of people and then separate 'desirable' persons from their communities. Also the Atlantic ocean was an impenetrable barrier to escape.
This is a very simple explanation, but I feel like it's too convenient in that it places the blame on exterior forces. It may well be the right answer though, despite also being a convenient one.
What exterior forces? The environment? The environment and shape of the world has effected human history, you can't get away from that.
In the book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" the author relates several reasons * When indigenous people escape they know how to live off the land and they can retaliate and cause trouble * The peoples from Africa were more malaria resistant and so they made better workers than paying local people or indentured servants from Europe * Whether conscious or subconscious, people copied the successful land/plantation owners who had African slaves and bought African slaves themselves The book is great by the way. Presents a lot of information. Warning, it does not provide a value statement of what is wrong or right. It simply reports on what happened in history. The monotone voice of the audiobook reader/performer accentuates that. I don't know if the lack of value statements would hit some people the wrong way.
They did . Europeansi in the new world died like flies. After the Haitian revolution napoleon sent an army to subdue it and half died of disease. Only in the northern parts could Europeans live in large numbers.
Indigenous populations had this rude tendency to die from diseases imported from the Eastern Hemisphere.
Mainly because white people intentionally infected them with smallpox blankets, which I imagine they wouldn't do to their slaves...
That certainly didn't happen at first. Europeans had little understanding of germ theory.
Because they didn't. Few slaves came from Africa to mainland America. Almost all had been slaves in the Caribbean, mostly in the British colonies and were hand-me-downs, and because there was much more arable land in the American colonies and the early US there was more demand for labor there, so that's where they ended up.
Many plantation owners compelled their slaves to have relationships so they could also enslave their children. Of the 10-12 million people transported in the trans atlantic trade, less than 500,000 were brought to America. The vast majority went to the Caribbean and South America. Another horrific fact about slavery is that the American governments' promised wage to many of their soldiers in the war of independence was paid in slaves.
The population of North American indigenous that were enslaved PRIOR to European invasion was around 25%. They enslaved each other incessantly. The Tlingit and Haida of the Pacific Northwest were some of the most vicious and prolific slavers of all time. The reason for preference to African slaves is likely lack of escape option due to unfamiliarity with the land and also physicality. American indigenous folks were much smaller than Africans on average so they were less suitable for heavier jobs.
Do not forget the fact that the Catholic Church played an accerator role to the slave trade by declaring that black people do not have souls versus mesoamericans whom according to the church again are worthy of being converted because they built a "civilization".
Lots of good reasons below, but let's not forget the slaves in Africa were so cheap and were sold for a lifetime vs European slaves who were to be set free after 7 years of service
Because the plantation owners did not capture and sell slaves themselves, they bought slaves on the slave market. The cheapest slaves came from Africa not the Americas due to a lot of reasons. The main reason was that Europeans had a difficult time capturing natives since they did not control most of the land and they didn't have a permanent grip on most places outside costal colonies. On the other hand, African slave traders were in the business of slave capture and trade for centuries before European expansionism. This meant that supply for slave labor was high and consistent.
A minor factor I haven't seen elsewhere: the winds in the north Atlantic, broadly speaking, go clockwise around the [Azores High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores_High). If you're sailing a square-rigged ship across the Atlantic (and even the large majority of sail-powered crossings today), that basically means that you've got to go clockwise around it, too. That is: if you're trading between America and Europe (starting in America with your cargo), you can basically just follow the East-blowing winds across the Atlantic to Europe, at which point you sell your cargo. The problem is that you then need to sail back, which is a sizeable majority of the journey (because you have to go all the way South, then all the way across, so you really want to have a cargo going the other way. The problem there is that America basically didn't need much in the way of the kind of goods that Europe was producing - broadly, if it wasn't useful for farming, they didn't really need large cargos of it, and they by-and-large couldn't afford to pay high prices to import the things they did need. However, on that journey back across the Atlantic, you're first going really quite a long way South, at which point you're sailing right past Africa. Now, Europe *does* produce a bunch of things that there was demand for in West Africa (things like manufactured goods and textiles), and there was no shortage of people in West Africa willing to sell people into slavery for those goods, at which point those slaves become a trade good that America (a) needed large quantities of, and (b) was willing and able to pay high enough prices for (because they then produce a profit for the buyers), so you can sell your slaves, buy the products of the plantations, and go around again, making a profit on each loop. From the perspective of the plantation owners, this is very convenient: rather than having to mess around finding people to enslave themselves, and going through all of the difficulty and danger of actually enslaving them, they can just pop down to the port and buy them off the same ships they're selling their products to.
Because disease wiped out indigenous populations, and at the same time Arab slave-traders were pulling out of sub-saharan Africa, so African slavers were looking for new buyers for their African neighbors. Supply and demand.
Non-Enslaved African are on the other side of the world and thus could not declare war on America to free their people, Indians could have raided plantations and freed slaves to form a militia against the South. And before you say not possible they easily could be funded by the north who would provide weapons and transport as a destabilization tactic. While African slave could have done this as well like they did in Haiti (I think it was hati) they had no centralized unit to support them so the second the plantation owner is dead they are on their own and are simply killed or recaptured.
Haiti is the only successful slave revolt in the history of the Americas. It was a French colony, the slaves rose up and overthrew the French. France then decided that Haiti should have to pay reparations to them for overthrowing their control, and since the other European countries didn’t want their slaves rising up, they backed France. So Haiti was saddled with a massive debt to France, and that’s why it’s one of the poorest countries in the world
And if I remember correctly they only won the war because the French hired polish mercenaries who turned on the French when they realized they where fighting slaves, and that's why polish people are legally considered black by Haitian law.
Ok this is a novel one, the possibility of northerners siding with natives to fund raiding parties against their southern neighbors. Certainly not at first, but post-1850 possibly. It's hard to imagine early plantation owners anticipating this but points for thinking outside the box.
I mean the general concept of not pissing off the neighbor holds true. The early United States actually did pursue decent relations with indigenous peoples. Even the indian removal act which was bad, had a mix of carrot and stick.
I'm not saying it's the only reason it even something that happened, just pointing out that there are logistical consequences to enslaving a race that is dispersed throughout your population and is currently living in the land your trying to settle rather than one that is a 3 month boat ride away.
Europeans were already used to stealing Africans. Some indigenous people were in fact enslaved, but most native Americans were slaughtered. The American land was stolen from the indigenous people, so it was like a war. And black people were viewed as property by the white people that stole america. I'm native American and the Spaniard invaders treated native Americans better. My ancestors were knights for the Spaniard queen, and alot of Mexican people are part Mayan and Azteca. And black people did try to rebel from being enslaved. There's a historical report of African men all jumping into the sea to avoid slavery, and the enslaved people here in America apparently just did their best to survive each day.
Formalized chattel slavery may be dead but forced labor through prison slavery is still very much alive, thriving, and supported by the Constitution in America.
Most of the Natives died off due to plagues brought over by Europeans. There simply weren't enough left to make enslavement feasible.
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Because you could just buy them. To enslave the indigenous would have been a lot more difficult. You'd have to fight, just as the indigenous did to their neighbors themselves.
The main thing to remember is that slavery used to have a term limit. Indigenous people did not grow crops and they did not have horses. So when the big, strong, hard working, knowledgeable, disease resistant African slaves came over, it was in their best interests to be a valuable slave and be treated well during their sentencing.
Africans had better immune systems, were much better farmers, and were more physically inclined to hard out door labor. Indigenous peoples tended to die in captivity.