Strayer, part IV, pp 448 - 458, CH 15

Between a 400 year period between the mid-fifteenth t- the mid-nineteenth century, there were an estimated 11 million slaves taken from Africa and shipped via the Atlantic Middle Passage. The textbook indicates that African society was disrupted, others were corrupted, and others were strengthened. Slavery is not a unique institution to early modern history. There was slavery even during the ancient era. And early readings suggested that the Industrial Revolution didn’t occur as quickly in the past because there was a large labor pool to discourage industrial innovation. Obviously, slavery was a part of that early modern labor poor. But, unlike the early modern era, from the ancient period onwards slavery was not racially motivated. Slaves before the early modern era were often prisoners of war, or they’d committed crimes, amongst some examples. In the Islamic world it’s no surprise to hear that female slaves were favored by a 2 – 1 margin. This figure conjures up images of the harems in the Islamic world. Slavery prior to 1500 could sometimes become “respected” members of households, but sometimes the children of slaves inherited their parents slave status. The Greeks and the Romans even had some of their children educated by slaves, if they were knowledgeable of foreign languages or some academic knowledge that was useful. Slavery before 1500 tended not to be within the purview of large-scale operations, such as plantations, but rather they worked in shops, small farms et cetera. Sugar plantations in the Mediterranian were the first large-scale producers of commodities requiring a large influx of slaves by Europeans around the time of the Crusades.

I had heard that the ethnic designation of “Slav” became the basis of our word for “slave” before, but Strayer was the first source that ever asserted it in writing. Because the trade of Slavic slaves was cut off from the Ottomans and because Native American populations were dying off, the west African slave trade had a major boom. However, racism in Slavery always somewhat existed in Europe. The English weren’t really so confident that they knew how to conduct the slave business effectively at first, so I know outside of the textbook, form other historians that Ireland was kind of a test-market for slavery to see how well the English did at slavery. The textbook presents coastal west Africans as being able to more easily defend themselves than history gives them credit. However, the Europeans didn’t always go inland to capture slaves. They hired middlemen to do the capturing much of the time. Europeans would often exploit tribal rivalries in which the slaves came as captured prisoners of war by rival tribes. Of course, many of the initial negations for slaves began at the highest level with west African kings and receiving their blessings in exchange for goods that the Europeans rendered unto them such as: metals, firearms, gunpowder, tobacco, alcohol, and decorative items, such as beads. Some of the goods had first been purchased elsewhere or mined in the Americas and traded for the slaves. This is what’s known as the triangle trades.