Chapter 14

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What was distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade? What did it share with other patterns of slave owning and slave trading? (Page 622). 


Atlantic slave trade had many distinctive features including the enormous scale of slave traffic; the centrality of slavery in the economies of colonial America; and the prevalence of slave labor in plantation farming.

There was a distinctive racial dimension as slavery in the Atlantic was fully identified with Africa and "blackness."

Also distinguishing was the treatment of slaves as a form of dehumanized property, without any rights in the society of their owners; and the practice of slave status was passed down over generations, with little hope of eventual freedom for the great majority.

The fact that American slaveholding took place in the only society is particularly ironic, with the possible exception of ancient Greece, which affirmed values of human freedom and equality while allowing widespread slavery.

But slave trade in the Atlantic had some similarities with other patterns of slave ownership, including the acquisition of African slaves; the enslavement of outsiders and other vulnerable people; and the fact that slavery has been a common practice since the earliest civilizations.


Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 22, 2020 at 11:56 AM

    Their journey across the Atlantic was horrendous, with the Middle Passage having an overall mortality rate of more than 14 percent. they were often sold several times on the harrowing journey to the coast, sometimes branded, and held in squalid slave dungeons while awaiting transportation to the New World—it was anything but a normal commercial transaction. One European engaged in the trade noted that “the negroes are so willful and loath to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats.”33 (American Yawp)

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