Wk# 6 Slave Trading

Slavery as I have come to learn is a huge part of global history. Various civilizations have turned to the use of slaves as a means to economic gain. I have learned that many merchants used slaves to help transport goods and thus increasing profit if they could carry more goods in a given trip, however, goods was not the only thing being traded. I have never been able to fathom why people can be so inhumane to one another. Slave trading in my personal opinion is one of the worst part of our history.

The Atlantic slave trade took millions of people from Africa, labeled them as slaves and sold them to to various locations across the Atlantic. I often associate this image with the opening scene of the movie Amistad (which is the true story of a slave ship from the late 1800’s) which portrays a very dark dilapidated ship transporting thousands and thousands of slaves to the Americas. These slaves were changed to the walls as they sat in their own urine and feces, how awful, how heartbreaking. As I tied this back to our text, I could only imagine how many lives were torn apart for the economic gain of the Elite who could afford to purchase slaves. Beyond lives being torn, the treatment that slaves were subjugated to was awful. What is even more sickening to me is the fact that slave trade was very normal and some Africans were willing to willingly sell their people into slave trade sometimes for simple commodities such as textiles, tobacco and Alcohol. This really made me understand the lack of regard people had for human life at that time.

All the aforementioned thoughts are true! I really despise the lack of value given to human life, however, after several history classes, I learned a few new things about slavery that I did not know before but it also made me wonder if it makes the situation any less severe. Something that I found very interesting was the type of people sold into slavery. As stated before some were willing to sell people into slavery but what mattered was the type of people sold into slavery. Our text mentioned that as demand increased, slaves sold were drawn from groups in Africa which included, “prisoners of war, criminals, debtors, people who had been sold during times of difficulty”. This to me translated to mean that, yes, people were sold into slavery, but they were the people who were not active contributing citizens. For a moment I thought well since they are the ones who fail to abide rules, maybe it could be ok, but as I thought about this I had to wonder what did it mean to be a criminal at that time, or what did it mean to be a debtor? There was just too many unanswered questions that I did not know about to feel comfortable with this justification.

It saddens me to think that for a large part of history, slaves were forcefully taken from Africa to better economies in other countries, yet Africa today still struggles in many of its countries to have basic living commodities. Today however we cannot deny the contributions reflected by the slave trade which include the variation in demographics not only of the Americas but many other countries who at one time or another participated in slave trading.