Table of Contents
What did the Europeans do to slaves?
The well-armed fort provided a secure harbor for Portuguese (and later Dutch and English) ships. Africans were either captured in warring raids or kidnapped and taken to the port by African slave traders. There they were exchanged for iron, guns, gunpowder, mirrors, knives, cloth, and beads brought by boat from Europe.
Why were slaves used on plantations?
Many slaves lived on large farms called plantations. These plantations produced important crops traded by the colony, crops such as cotton and tobacco. Each plantation was like a small village owned by one family.
What did slaves grow on plantations?
Most favoured by slave owners were commercial crops such as olives, grapes, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and certain forms of rice that demanded intense labour to plant, considerable tending throughout the growing season, and significant labour for harvesting.
How did plantations work?
The plantation system developed in the American South as the British colonists arrived in Virginia and divided the land into large areas suitable for farming. Because the economy of the South depended on the cultivation of crops, the need for agricultural labor led to the establishment of slavery.
What was the goal of the plantation system in the New World?
How did the European plantation system impact the Western Hemisphere?
-European plantation systems in the Caribbean and the Americas destroyed indigenous economies and damaged the environment. Western Hemisphere agricultural products, such as corn, potatoes, and tobacco, changed European lifestyles. • European horses and cattle changed the lifestyles of American Indians.
What was the role of plantations in the New World?
Plantation agriculture and cash crop trading played a central role in fueling European expansion into the New World, and in developing chattel slavery, primarily of Africans, in the Americas. Slaves working on a tobacco plantation in seventeenth century Virginia, 1670.
What was the impact of Atlantic slavery on Europe?
What was the impact of Atlantic slavery on Europe?1This question lies at heart of the Williams hypothesis: the theory put forth by historian Eric Williams that pro\\fts from the Atlantic slave trade and plantations in the Americas helped \\fnance the British industrial revolution.
How did the European plantations in Africa develop?
These plantations developed from Mediterranean farming systems that focused on growing cash crops for trade rather than on subsistence crops for local use. Europeans first encountered many of their major cash crops, such as sugar, through exposure to Muslim agriculture during the Crusades (from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries).
How did the slave trade lead to the expansion of the plantation?
Later, when the British began rice cultivation in the Carolinas, they again turned to the plantation model and the number of slaves grew rapidly: by 1750, 40,000 had been trafficked there. This massive expansion of the enslaved population of the Americas was all made possible, of course, by the transatlantic slave trade.