Slavery in America
European explorers first enslaved individuals and groups native to the American continent during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in a drive for the accumulation of capital wealth. When indigenous slavery failed, systematically organized African slave-labor became integral to the complex economic systems of British mercantilism and Western capitalism. The voyages of European explorers made the trade in Africans, and the staples of their labor, top priorities in the exchange and development of European markets and wealth. Hence slavery emerged in the thirteen American colonies in relation to the development of the Western world. As W. E. B. DuBois notes in The Suppression of the Slave Trade to the United States, 1638–1870 (1965 [1898]), the colonies played a vital role in the Triangular Trade between Europe, North America, and Africa during the eighteenth century. The British maintained that the slave trade was the "very life of the colonies."
Africans themselves participated in trading other Africans who were enslaved, usually as a result of tribal wars on the continent. African slavery was not benign, but European and North American slavery were wholly different from what Africans understood slavery to be. American slavery was permanent rather than indentured; it could be inherited and passed from generation to generation; it was based on racial oppression; and it deemed its subjects to be the subhuman property of others.
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