Slave Chronology it Is Hopefully

Slave Chronology

It is hopefully well-known that the life of a slave was never any easy one, no matter who the enslaved or the enslaver were, in any period of history. There are some particular aspects of the trade in African slaves that took place between Europe and the New World in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even early nineteenth centuries that bear particular mention, however. The sheer scope and commercialization of the Atlantic Slave Trade, as it is known, had never before been paralleled. The numbers of people enslaved and their treatment by their captors and eventual masters was largely unregulated and unknown by the public, and for arguably the first time masses of slaves were seen purely as animals, and not even as the human beings that they and all slaves were.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was possible largely because "Europe clearly was unique at that time in its ability to mobilize capital and labor over very long periods (Klein, 53). The mass slave trade was known as the Atlantic Slave Trade because all of the components sat oon the Atlantic Ocean -- Europe, with its merchants and slave traders; Africa, with its market for manufactured goods and its supply of slaves; and the Americas, with their demand for labor and supplies as well as large quantities of the sugar, rum, and other exotic commodities that were so in demand back in Europe, driving the trade of each individual commodity -- especially slaves -- ever higher.

Because there was something to both buy and sell at each stop these ships made, the trade was very profitable, and it became known as the triangle of trade, or triangular commerce. Many historians believe that the slave trade continued for as long as it did because this triangular commerce was so effective; the returns for investors were incredibly high, and the risk was as minimal as it got in sea-faring trading, because as long as the goods arrived at each destination intact a sale was virtually guaranteed (Williams and Plamer, 52). Slaves were an integral part of the value of this triangular commerce, and therefore slave traders and other merchants spent a lot of time, money, and energy into keeping slavery and the slave trade around. Their attention did not extend to the slaves themselves, however.

As much as ten to thirty percent of slaves transported across the Atlantic along the middle passage of the triangular journey perished, but the slave trade flourished in Europe just the same (Williams and Palmer, 133). Disease, complete immobility, lack of space and fresh air, and sometimes even a lack of food and water, claimed many victims along the journey, yet these conditions were often legally sanctioned. For a slave that had been captured in Africa, however, this was just the beginning of the trouble. Life on the plantation was not easy, either, and many deaths occurred from overwork (Maroons). In response to this, a group of escaped slave known as the Maroons established their own successfully resistant government in the mountains of Jamaica in the late seventeenth century.