Page 236 - The Dutch Caribbean Isles

he South Atlantic economic system owners, and children born to slave mothers century: “All the old writers... concur in
were slaves. As property, the people were stating not only that wars are entered into
T centered on producing commodity considered merchandise or units of labour, for the sole purpose of making slaves, but
and were sold at markets with other goods that they are fomented by Europeans, with
crops, and making goods and clothing to and services. a view to that object. People living around
sell in Europe, and increasing the numbers the Niger River were transported from
of African slaves brought to the New World. T he Atlantic slave traders, ordered by these markets to the coast and sold at Euro-
This was crucial to those Western European trade volume, were: the Portuguese, pean trading ports in exchange for muskets
countries which, in the late seventeenth the British, the French, the Spanish, the and manufactured goods such as cloth or
and eighteenth centuries, were vying with Dutch Empire, and the United States. They alcohol. However, the European demand for
each other to create overseas empires. The had established outposts on the African slaves provided a large new market for the
Portuguese were the first to engage in the coast where they purchased slaves from already existing trade. While those held in
New World slave trade in the 16th century, local African leaders. Current estimates are slavery in their own region of Africa might
and others soon followed. Ship owners con- that about 12 million Africans were shipped hope to escape, those shipped away had
sidered the slaves as cargo to be transport- across the Atlantic, although the number little chance of returning to Africa.
ed to the Americas as quickly and cheaply purchased by the traders is considerably
as possible, there to be sold to labour in higher. T he First Atlantic system was the trade
coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar and cotton of enslaved Africans to, primarily,
plantations, gold and silver mines, rice E uropeans usually bought enslaved South American colonies of the Portuguese
fields, construction industry, cutting timber people who were captured in endemic Empire and Spanish Empire; it accounted
for ships, in skilled labour, and as domestic warfare between African states. Some Afri- for slightly more than 3% of all Atlantic
servants. The first Africans imported to the cans had made a business out of capturing slave trade. It started on a significant scale
English colonies were classified as “inden- Africans from neighboring ethnic groups or in about 1502 and lasted until 1580 when
tured servants,” like workers coming from war captives and selling them. A reminder Portugal was temporarily united with Spain.
England, and also, “apprentices for life”. By of this practice is documented in the Slave
the middle of the 17th century, slavery had Trade Debates of England in the early 19th
hardened as a racial caste; they and their
offspring were legally the property of their