Slavery and Servitude in the Western World

Slavery and Servitude in the Western World
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Slavery and Servitude in the Western World
When the world regrets that phenomena such as world wars and pandemics had to get in its history, it also looks back and wonders what was going on in the minds of those who entrenched slavery, which was such a direct abuse of the civil rights of individuals and societies. Slavery happened in varying magnitudes and took different forms across cultures, with differing impacts and implications. One of the most conspicuous forms of slavery in history is the transatlantic slave trade, where enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic to America such that they may be used for labor in plantations. Scholars have provided a range of reasons why Africans were preferred over Europeans. This paper aims to research the ideal reasons why Europeans could not enslave even jailed criminals from their homeland but instead go for innocent Africans and subject them to inhuman conditions far from their motherlands and loved ones.
Factors behind Vulnerability of Africans to Slavery in America
According to Eltis (2000,7), one of the main reasons Africans were preferred slavery was their immunity to diseases, especially when pandemics such as smallpox prevailed across the Americas. Such immunity made them more reliable than slaves from other areas who often fell sick and were too feeble to work while others died in significant numbers. Enslaved people from the West Indies and Europe were also not as resilient as those from Africa, and while made to handle strenuous tasks under pressure, they would sink into depression and die (Gonzalez 2021,13). America needed efficient and effective labor after witnessing massive growth in demand for sugar and therefore had to come up with ways of deriving cheap labour, which made them go for this new form of slavery that succeeded slavery seen in the 16th century.[Eltis, David. The rise of African slavery in the Americas. Cambridge University Press, 2000.] [Gonzalez, Jorge Felipe. "The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790–1820." The Journal of African History (2021): 1-23.]
Africans have been their enemies for a long and when the Europeans were quite conservative about sending their own for deplorable living in America, the greed of African traders made it extremely easy for Americans to buy them on the West African coast (Bertocchi 2016,7). The high population of Africans being sold to America reduced their prices, and the buyers preferred them over negotiating with brokers from other societies for expensive and unpredictable labor. That greed was supplemented by the military strength of the West and America was undergoing an industrial revolution at an exponential rate while establishing itself as a global challenger in the international community (Eltis 2000,7). Therefore, capitalism was gaining ground among societies and the desire for dominance everywhere and other factors left Africans most vulnerable to the slave traders. The Europeans massed a lot of wealth and status, and at the beginning of the 19th century, they started working to abolish slavery.[Bertocchi, Graziella. "The legacie...