Slave Trade and Sugar Rush

Slavery and slave trading was one of the many common occurrences in the Atlantic trade. In his blog post about Chapter 5 of The Atlantic World, my colleague Robert Deleon mentioned, “due to European diseases and the harsh working conditions native populations experienced massive amounts of deaths.” The native population was diminishing quickly because of overworking, forced migration, and epidemic diseases. This led to the switch of African labor. It was around the sixteenth century that sugar plantations began to appear. As Vierira mentioned in his article, the need for African labor rose as the demand for sugar soared. There were vast plantations that were staffed by hundreds of enslaved Africans. Sidney Mintz also mentioned that the English people saw sugar as an essential item and that “supplying them with it became as much a political as an economic obligation” (157). Egerton ed al argued that the sugar revolution was one of the factors that made the transoceanic slave trade the largest forced movement of human beings in history and the largest intercontinental migration.

The Spanish were the first to capitalize on the adaption of sugarcanes to the American tropics. This eventually brought African labor to the sugar plantations in the Americas. I found Mintz statement about sugar plantation owners making immense fortune off the labor of millions of stolen Africans on the acres of land stolen from the Indians very interesting (157). It was true, Europeans were making money without much of their own effort. Their fortune was cultivated with someone else’s labor and someone else’s land. Africans tried to resist and fight enslavement. They tried running away, poisoning their masters, or participated in full scale revolts (Egerton et al, 210). The last verified slave trade occurred in January 1870. Interestingly though, there was a women by the name of Maria la Conguita that claimed she was sold into Cuba in 1878.