USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Ivory, gold and other trade resources attracted Europeans to West Africa. As demand for cheap labour to work on plantations in the Americas grew, people enslaved in West Africa became the most valuable ‘commodity’ for European traders. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans arrived.

Detailed explanation-2: -Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all long-distance global migrations.

Detailed explanation-3: -The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet unknown loss of life for African captives both in and outside the Americas. “More than a million people are thought to have died” during their transport to the New World according to a BBC report.

Detailed explanation-4: -Europe’s conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit to work in the tropical conditions of the New World.