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.

Detailed explanation-2: -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.

Detailed explanation-3: -Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco. In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development.

Detailed explanation-4: -This remarkable growth was the result of two factors: (1) continued importation of new slaves from Africa and the Caribbean; and (2) natural population growth, especially among American-born slaves, who lived longer lives and bore more children than African-born slaves.