what were african slaves most often sold to europeans in exchange for?
The trans-Atlantic slave merchandise was the largest long-distance forced movement of people in recorded history. From the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, over twelve million (some estimates run as high as fifteen million) African men, women, and children were enslaved, transported to the Americas, and bought and sold primarily by European and Euro-American slaveholders as chattel holding used for their labor and skills.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade occurred within a broader system of trade between West and Central Africa, Western Europe, and Due north and Due south America. In African ports, European traders exchanged metals, material, beads, guns, and ammunition for captive Africans brought to the declension from the African interior, primarily past African traders. Many captives died simply during the long overland journeys from the interior to the coast. European traders then held the enslaved Africans who survived in fortified slave castles such as Elmina in the cardinal region (now Ghana), Goree Island (now in nowadays day Senegal), and Bunce Island (now in present day Sierra Leone), before forcing them into ships for the Eye Passage beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
Scholars estimate that from x to nineteen percent of the millions of Africans forced into the Eye Passage beyond the Atlantic died due to rough weather condition on slave ships. Those who arrived at diverse ports in the Americas were then sold in public auctions or smaller trading venues to plantation owners, merchants, small farmers, prosperous tradesmen, and other slave traders. These traders could then transport slaves many miles further to sell on other Caribbean islands or into the Due north or Due south American interior. Predominantly European slaveholders purchased enslaved Africans to provide labor that included domestic service and artisanal trades. The majority, nonetheless, provided agricultural labor and skills to produce plantation cash crops for national and international markets. Slaveholders used profits from these exports to expand their landholdings and buy more enslaved Africans, perpetuating the trans-Atlantic slave trade cycle for centuries, until various European countries and new American nations officially ceased their participation in the merchandise in the nineteenth century (though illegal trans-Atlantic slave trading connected fifty-fifty afterwards national and colonial governments issued legal bans).
ESTABLISHING THE Merchandise
In the fifteenth century, Portugal became the first European nation to take significant office in African slave trading. The Portuguese primarily acquired slaves for labor on Atlantic African island plantations, and later for plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, though they also sent a small-scale number to Europe. Initially, Portuguese explorers attempted to acquire African labor through straight raids along the coast, simply they found that these attacks were costly and frequently ineffective confronting Westward and Central African armed services strategies.
For example, in 1444, Portuguese marauders arrived in Senegal ready to set on and capture Africans using armor, swords, and abyssal vessels. But the Portuguese discovered that the Senegalese out-maneuvered their ships using lite, shallow water vessels meliorate suited to the estuaries of the Senegalese coast. In addition, the Senegalese fought with toxicant arrows that slipped through their armor and decimated the Portuguese soldiers. Subsequently, Portuguese traders generally abandoned straight gainsay and established commercial relations with Westward and Central African leaders, who agreed to sell slaves taken from diverse African wars or domestic trading, as well as golden and other bolt, in exchange for European and Due north African goods.
Over time, the Portuguese adult additional slave trade partnerships with African leaders along the W and Key African declension and claimed a monopoly over these relationships, which initially express admission to the trade for other western European competitors. Despite Portuguese claims, African leaders enforced their own local laws and community in negotiating merchandise relations. Many welcomed additional merchandise with Europeans from other nations.
When Portuguese, and later their European competitors, establish that peaceful commercial relations lonely did not generate plenty enslaved Africans to fill the growing demands of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they formed military alliances with sure African groups against their enemies. This encouraged more than all-encompassing warfare to produce captives for trading. While European-backed Africans had their own political or economic reasons for fighting with other African enemies, the end result for Europeans traders in these military alliances was greater access to enslaved war captives. To a lesser extent, Europeans besides pursued African colonization to secure admission to slaves and other appurtenances. For example, the Portuguese colonized portions of Angola in 1571 with the assist of military alliances from Kongo, but were pushed out in 1591 by their erstwhile allies. Throughout this early period, African leaders and European competitors ultimately prevented these attempts at African colonization from becoming every bit extensive as in the Americas.
The Portuguese dominated the early trans-Atlantic slave trade on the African coast in the sixteenth century. As a result, other European nations first gained access to enslaved Africans through privateering during wars with the Portuguese,rather than through direct trade. When English language, Dutch, or French privateers captured Portuguese ships during Atlantic maritime conflicts, they often found enslaved Africans on these ships, as well as Atlantic trade appurtenances, and they sent these captives to work in their own colonies.
In this way, privateering generated a marketplace interest in the trans-Atlantic slave trade across European colonies in the Americas. Later Portugal temporarily united with Spain in 1580, the Spanish broke up the Portuguese slave trade monopoly past offering straight slave trading contracts to other European merchants. Known as theasiento system, the Dutch took advantage of these contracts to compete with the Portuguese and Castilian for direct access to African slave trading, and the British and French eventually followed. By the eighteenth century, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade reached its trafficking peak, the British (followed by the French and Portuguese) had become the largest carriers of enslaved Africans beyond the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority of enslaved Africans went to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, and a smaller percent went to N America and other parts of South and Central America.
Source: https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/trans_atlantic_slave_trade
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