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.