The African slave trade.The Great Dying also set in motion another process: the forced migration of millions of African men and women across the Atlantic. This was because in order to keep the mines, plantations, and haciendas producing for the European market, European mine and estate owners had to find more labor. Because of the Great Dying, European entrepreneurs were frequently unable to find the local Indian labor they wanted, while free Europeans were unwilling to cross the Atlantic in large numbers to take up back-breaking jobs and expose themselves to tropical diseases. In order to continue making handsome profits from production and sale of sugar, silver, and other commodities, they brought in African slaves. From a sugar planter’s point of view, African slaves—plentiful, cheap, and usually experienced at farming—were a practical solution. Between 1450 and 1810, perhaps 11 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas.
European sea merchants contracted with African rulers and traders to sell them captured Africans who had been enslaved by fellow Africans in their homelands. Historians have estimated that 42 percent of these enslaved men and women were sent to the Caribbean, 38 percent to Brazil, and only 5 percent to North America. The slave trade was disastrous for tropical Africa as a whole. African slave traders aimed to capture and sell mainly young women and men because they were the age group best fit to work and reproduce. The trade therefore drained African societies of their most productive people. The population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1900 was about 95 million. If the trade had not occurred, it would likely have been much higher. Between 1500 and 1800 the proportion of men and women of African origin in the Americas steadily grew. From a demographic perspective, the hemisphere was becoming increasingly “Africanized.” During the same period, a second major migration, this one voluntary, further altered the population profile of the Americas. Between 1500 and 1800 about 2 million Europeans traveled to the Western Hemisphere. Europeans, however, still constituted a minority of the population in most parts of the Americas as late as 1800. It was only in Big Era Seven that the demographic “Europeanization” of the Americas really took off. |
Sugar Plantation Mill Yard Island of Antigua Caribbean, 1823. |