The document summarizes the history of Africa between 1500-1650. It describes the major states and kingdoms that existed, including Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kongo, and Ndongo. It discusses the influence of the Portuguese and Islamic slave trade. Several African societies resisted the slave trade while others gained wealth from participating in it. The slave trade had profound social, political, and economic impacts on African societies and populations over this time period.
Historia mediaval de España, en inglés, para alumnos de 5º de Educación Primaria. Colegio Sagrados Corazones (Santo Domingo de la Calzada). Realizado por el profesor Marcos Bustillo Ramírez.
Historia mediaval de España, en inglés, para alumnos de 5º de Educación Primaria. Colegio Sagrados Corazones (Santo Domingo de la Calzada). Realizado por el profesor Marcos Bustillo Ramírez.
For centuries, the trade along a triangular trading route, provide.docxAKHIL969626
For centuries, the trade along a triangular trading route, provided the capital to finance the industrialization of Europe and development of the European economy - trade only possible at the expense of slaves.
The Triangular Trade consisted of three stops:
· The outward passage from Europe to Africa bearing manufactured goods.
· The middle passage from Africa to the Americas bearing African captives.
· The homeward passage from the Americas to Europe carrying sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and cocoa (Source: Triangular Trade).
We know that before the Middle Passage, a slave trade already existed in Africa, but this was different. The Middle Passage was a systematic process of extracting Africans for a specific purpose, as workers stripped of their humanity in the New World.
The ill-fated relationship between the Kongolese and Portuguese evolved over time. While the Portuguese struggled to find an asset with which they could entice the Africans to trade, the shift in their subservient position was gradual. The influx of European goods, particularly firearms, slowly disrupted West African cultures. The technological advancement of gunfire brought the Europeans power and wealth, but for some West Africans is empowered them to more efficiently captured slaves. Religious and political structural division within West African states reinforced the slave system and produced a profitable supply of slaves which were traded for European goods, largely guns. Those communities that captured the most slaves received the most European goods, and were the best equipped to expand their power and prestige in West Africa (Source: Scott).
The Ashantis and Dahomeans specialized in the art of enslaving. Initially cut off from the Europeans by coastal tribes, who acted as middlemen, these two tribes from the interior of Africa, pushed toward the sea, extending their terror as their power increased. In 1727, John Atkins complained that the triumph of Dahomey had destroyed the orderly patterns of the slave trade. Specialized trading states was matched by the arrival of independent traders who sights were set on acquiring slaves quickly for maximum profit (Source: Scott).
It can be argued quite effectively that sugar was the number one crop that produced growth for Europe. Sugar production and potential profits served as the basis for a plantation complex that fueled the need for slaves. Your textbook states that something as evil and gruesome as the Atlantic slave trade was set in motion largely to produce something as apparently benign as sugar. While that is overly simplified, it paints a vivid reality -- trafficking of humans for their labor to satisfy the sweet tooth of Europe and to feed the coffers of capitalists (though they would not have been called capitalists in the 15th century).
Sugar was introduced to Europeans by Muslims during the Crusades. Cultivation began in Cyprus and Sicily at least a centuries before the Portuguese started exploring the ...