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In his Labor, Migration, and settlement post Robert Deleon states, “Through Europeans desire to prosper quickly from the New World, mobilizing indigenous workers became a priority.” This can be directly linked with the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas reading. According to chapter six in the Atlantic world text, it was the original intent or Europeans to use indigenous labor in order to work sugar plantations and other cash crops. It was never their original intention to use African slaves. Only after indigenous people began to fall ill and die from disease and injuries related to heavy labor, casing the dreams of their conquerors of using their labor to gain riches also to die. This led the Europeans to seek an alternative source of labor.
The most interesting part of the chapter for me was the information regarding the circumstances surrounding the European and African trading of slaves. The Africans seemed to hold all the cards in slave trade negotiations, something that the Europeans did not like, but they could not change at that point in time. The Africans only traded slaves with Europeans because they came to Africa with goods that were in high demand. “Of course, if Europeans had not possessed, or had lacked the ability to acquire, items that Africans wanted, there would have been no trade, (Egerton et al, 193). It was expected that the Europeans bring to Africa the most popular and luxurious goods from all around the world when attempting to engage in the slave trade. The Coastal Africans did not see themselves as selling off their own people in the slave trade. Instead, they viewed the captured Africans different then themselves because they belonged to different tribes and were often prisoners of war.