Chapter 14 - Economic Transformations (Commerce & Consequences)
All of Chapter 14 is based on the international networks of exchange that helped shape human interactions during the centuries between 1450 and 1750. There was lots of different commerce going on around this period in history, for example The Spice Trade, Silver Trade, The North American Fur Trade, but one that really impacted me when reading, and impacted the world itself is The Atlantic Slave Trade.
"Of all the commercial ties that linked the early modern world into a global network of exchange, none had more profound or enduring human consequences than the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves."
Slaves would often be sold several times on their journey, sometimes even branded, and held in slave dungeons while awaiting transportation to the New World, but was nothing like all the other trades going on around the world. I could only imagine what these people felt during these times, it breaks my heart knowing that this was something "normal" or even ok to do.
The slavery that was in the Americas was distinctive is many different ways, that in other parts of the world. One of those distinctions being that simply the immense size of the traffic in slaves. Slavery in the Americas was largely based on plantation agriculture and they dehumanized slaves by treating them like property, they also didn't have any rights. The saddest part about this was that ones place status was inherited across generations, so there was little to no hope of freedom for these slaves and their generations to come.
While reading this chapter, I came across this quote that really impacted me and I wanted to share it to this post.
"The negroes are so willful and loath to leave their own country, that they have often leap'd out of the canoes, boat, ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats."
"Of all the commercial ties that linked the early modern world into a global network of exchange, none had more profound or enduring human consequences than the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves."
Slaves would often be sold several times on their journey, sometimes even branded, and held in slave dungeons while awaiting transportation to the New World, but was nothing like all the other trades going on around the world. I could only imagine what these people felt during these times, it breaks my heart knowing that this was something "normal" or even ok to do.
The slavery that was in the Americas was distinctive is many different ways, that in other parts of the world. One of those distinctions being that simply the immense size of the traffic in slaves. Slavery in the Americas was largely based on plantation agriculture and they dehumanized slaves by treating them like property, they also didn't have any rights. The saddest part about this was that ones place status was inherited across generations, so there was little to no hope of freedom for these slaves and their generations to come.
While reading this chapter, I came across this quote that really impacted me and I wanted to share it to this post.
"The negroes are so willful and loath to leave their own country, that they have often leap'd out of the canoes, boat, ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats."
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