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¶ … Sugar
When it comes to the slave trade, there are many facets, periods and facts surrounding slavery and how it progressed that can be explored, nitpicked and analyzed. However, that overall subject is rather broad and without focus, one could literally write a book about the subject and not run out of fresh material to look at or use. However, the author of this report would avoid that by focusing on the middle passage, the sugar trade that occurred during the same and why slavery was the common choice to facilitate the sugar trade rather than focus on the use of indentured servants or even paid labor. While the fairly easy answer is that the subjugation and exploitation of blacks allowed for good labor for free other than the movement and control of the slaves.
Analysis
Even with the fairly obvious reasons why slaves were the tool of the trade used to provide labor for the sugar trade, the issue is far from being monolithic when it comes to who supported it, who did not support it and what happened as a result of this back and forth. The sugar harvesting situation in question has come to be an extremely salient example of triangular trade. Beyond that, it was a very profitable example. What is meant by triangular trade is that there three, rather than two, points of commerce when it came to the economics of how the sugar trade worked. Manufacturing goods were traded for the West African coast in exchange for slaves that were traded from that point....
Those slaves were then shipped to the sugar colonies to work the fields. This is the "middle passage" referenced in the title of this report. Thirdly, there was the shipment of completely and harvested sugar, molasses and rum that were shipped from the islands to England. All of this went on despite the fact that slavery was technically illegal in England dating back to 1772. Beyond that, Parliament was in a tizzy about the fact it was going on in the columns and in the thick of the broader trade movements of the same. Even with slavery itself being outlawed in 1772, the sugar trade that involved the slavery was not banned until 1807 and the slaves themselves were not emancipated until 1833 (Michigan, 2016).
While the use of paid labor and/or indentured servants was technically an option prior to the banning of the use of slaves, the conditions and situations that were enforced during the sugar trade that involved the salves would not have been acceptable given the conditions that he slaves faced. Mortality rates were alarmingly high for the slaves that worked in the area. In total, there were roughly four million slaves brought to the Caribbean as part of the sugar trade. Almost every single one of those millions of slaves ended up on sugar plantations. The conditions face by the slaves were extremely harsh. The prior-mentioned mortality rates faced by slaves were sometimes ten times as much as those of the Europeans in the same area. The slaves did not always take all…
References
Great Blacks in Wax. (2016). National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Greatblacksinwax.org. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from http://www.greatblacksinwax.org/Exhibits/middle_pass.htm
Michigan. (2016). Sugar in the Atlantic World -- Case 6 Sugar and Slavery. Clements.umich.edu. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from http://clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/sugarexhibit/sugar06.php
PBS. (2016). Africans in America/Part 1/The Middle Passage. Pbs.org. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html
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