ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
The Atlantic slave trade mainly originated, as a result of shortage of labor in the redeveloping New world. The New world economy was almost in a recession, and the contemporary European population in the Americas wasn’t efficient enough to produce the necessary crop that was needed such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton. The reasons for slavery “ are not moral, but economical circumstance; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production.” (Gibbon Wakefield). This reason shows the manifest function of the slave trade, as suppose to the latent fuction people think it was because of racism. Saying racism was the driving force behind the Atlantic slave, would be out of context because prior to the Europeans migration to Africa they use the aborigines and then turned to Africans, and they had brought some laborers to work with them for a period of time.
“When slavery is adopted, it is not adopted as the choice over free labor; there is no choice at all”. It wasn’t by choice the Europeans chose African people for slave trade. They had reason for that and they are: the aborigines which were the native americans weren’t efficient slaves because of their numbers and they weren’t immune to the dieseases brought to the New world by the Europeans. The native people knew their way around the surroundings and it was easy for them to escape, and as the work in the mines expands they needed more labors. A prominent official in Hispaniola insisted in 1518 that “ permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for labor, instead of natives, so weak that they can only be in tasks requiring little endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms” this statement justify their actions of taking Africans from Africa and bringing into the new world, because they needed their endurance for the type work that was needed to be done.
There were numerous perpetrators that was involed in the slave trade, but the countries that standout among the rest...