Short Essay 1

“The Black Atlantic” could easily be applied to the height of the slave trade during the 18th century. The number of slaves being taken from Africa greatly increased during the 18th century, then started to slow down during the first half of the 19th century. According to Tables I and II, Eltis estimates the number of Africans sent to the Americas at 11,062,000 over approximately 350 years. The business of slave trading was quite lucrative. It is certainly likely that there were more slaves shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold than certain products or crops.
The Africans that participated in “the Black Atlantic” were taken from their homelands and quite often their families and traded halfway across the world to place where the only other people that spoke the same language were fellow slaves. Even then, if they were from different regions, it is likely that they spoke different dialects. Slaves were in unfamiliar territory surrounded by strangers, both black and white. At the time, white slave owners grouped all slaves in the category of Africans, but the Africans did not define themselves in such a broad, general sense but rather “saw themselves in terms of their local communities” (Inikori 48).
Obviously, African slaves were forced to work for no pay. In some regions, such as in the Caribbean where planters grew sugar cane, slaves were sometimes literally worked to death. Sugar cane so valuable that it was cheaper to buy new slaves than to feed, clothe and shelter the slaves already on the plantation. The effects of the slave trade were long lasting. Africans were viewed as inhuman, and slaves were treated as simply property. Freed slaves and their children might have had their freedom, but they still faced many social, economic, and political injustices.
Africans traded to the Americas were not the only ones who faced hardships in the aftermath. Walter Rodney noticed that when populations were decreased so drastically in infested areas, the societies there collapsed (Inikori 49). However, Joseph Miller argued that those millions of Africans that were shipped across the Atlantic or died in the slave wars still would have starved due to the droughts (Inikori 49).
“The Black Atlantic” caused problems on both sides of the Atlantic, but that is not entirely to blame on the foreigners. Europeans were not the only ones involved in the slave trade. In fact, many Africans participated in the capturing and selling of slaves and managed to make quite a profit from it.