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In the excerpts from Mitz’s work dealing with sugar, they discuss the rise in popularity of sugar in England and the various effects things that this influenced or was influenced by. Early in the reading, Mitz points out how English aristocrats saw sugar as a means of showing off their wealth. They then move on to talking about sugar islands, which ties into the second reading in this post, Chapter 6 of the Atlantic world. In chapter six of the Atlantic world, the focus is on the slave trade and slavery in the Americas, as the chapter title states. In this chapter, the authors discuss a number of things relating to slavery. These include things like how the sugar trade fed into the slave trade, where a large portion of slaves came from, and the passage from Africa to the Americas.
One of the new things that I learned about in these reading was in regards to slave resistance in the slave trade. In chapter 6 of the Atlantic World, there is a part that discusses the ways that slaves resisted their bondage. One major example is Maroon Settlements which were settlements where slaves would escape to. Hunter Loya also took an interest in this topic, where he noted that these settlements acted as a way for slaves to fight back against those that would enslave them. This point was very interesting to me as in most depictions/discussion of slavery there is only a tiny bit of talk about the ways in which slaves would fight back against their captors. It also got me thinking about how in this way Native Americans and African slaves have been misrepresented. Looking back at the article that dealt with the Salt Water Frontier, the author noted how many perceived the Natives as being onlookers who only became active with the arrival of Europeans. This ties into, at least in regards to my past education on the subject, natives and slaves being portrayed as not really taking action but instead being acted upon by Europeans. Whereas this chapter and the saltwater frontier article, highlight how that was not necessarily the case.