Trans Atlantic Slave Trade

1.2 THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Writing about slavery it is essential to show the importance of the so-called trans-Atlantic slave trade. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in the world. It created permanent ties between Africa and North America. It was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history and, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, formed the major demographic well-spring for the re-peopling of the Americas following the collapse of the Amerindian population. It was the trading, primarily of African people, to the colonies of the New World that occurred in and around the Atlantic Ocean. It lasted from the mid-15th to the 19th centuries. The trans-Atlantic slave trade began around the mid-fifteenth century when Portuguese interests in Africa moved away from the fabled deposits of gold to a much more readily available commodity - slaves. By the seventeenth century the trade was in full swing, reaching a peak towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was a trade which was especially fruitful, since every stage of the journey could be profitable for merchants -- the infamous triangular trade. The quiestion arisies why did the trade begin? The answer is easy and rueful: expanding European empires in the New World needed work force. In most cases the indigenous peoples had proved unreliable -most of them were dying from diseases brought over from Europe-, and Europeans were not adapted to the climate and suffered under tropical diseases. The Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could "work very hard" on plantations or in the mines. Most of these enslaved people were shipped from West Africa and Central Africa and taken to North and South America to work as unpaid labor on sugar, coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, on rice...