Week Four

From the readings this week, I was most intrested by the "Voices of the Slave Trade". The passages themselves were each different and offered different perspective on the slave trade. I thought it was very effective to write letters to the different people who wrote the passages. I chose the second passge because I was a feeling that most would have assumed that one in his position would have being involved in the slave trade. I did not expect him to feel bad or even feel for the slaves he was purchasing, but the language Thomas Phillips used to describe his journey of buying slaves really angered me because he spoke of trading humans as one today would talk about trading stocks. I wrote : A man like yourslef is clearly a money motivated and well educated on how business trades are conducted. Your efforts and profits would be commendable, if you were not selling humans for the benefit of your personal and financial gain. in your passgae you describe your experience as if it was a pleasent journey through the market looking for slaves and barding prices for the finest African you could fine in exchange for goods. Did the horror on the slaves faces not make you feel bad or think that you were doing something wrong? I hope that on your journey back to England you were able to talk to he slaves and get their perspective.

Week Three

Early Modern commerce in people 
"Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often brief lives as slaves" was a passage from the reading that not only made me sad, but hurt me to read. Knowning that my ancestors had to endure such hardships because of their skin color and their different ways of being civilzed, they were taken from their land to become slaves. The defintion of a slave is someone who has no contract or is unwillingly being controlled by another person agianst their will. The Atlantic Slave trade was the most recent large-scale of human trafficking of owning and exchanging human beings. No matter how much I learn about slavery, I am still shocked by the justifications or stories about slavery. Slavery was practiced before the Atlantic Slave trade, in some African countries they sold their own people to different coutries, and slavery was being practiced in other parts of the country as well. The Atlantic Slave Trade bought so many slaves to the new world because of the need and want for sugar. They knew that the labor work was  difficult, dangerous, and nobdoy would want to do it so they relied on slavery to be their source of labor for sugar plantations. This is similar to how American companies product their products in other countries for cheap labor to save money and not paying the proper legal wages.

Week Two

Reading the handout "Sweet Mexus: Sugar and the Orgins of the Modern World" was an eye opening experience to know that something as simple as sugar was once upon a time in history a major factor in the mistreatment and was the justification for having slaves. Slavery and sugar were two of the main investments that people around the world wanted to part take. The reading states that at one point sugar was unknown to Europe and later with exploration of other countries, they were hooked and wanted more. Money was to be made, so mass production of sugar cane continued the high supply and demand for sugar. It was once a luxary and become a necessity, which explains the rapid demand for sugar and how sugar plantations evolved. It was an intresting reading and it explained how the time period of slavery had evolved.

YAY - I'm done