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: -As a result, Europeans looked to Africa for a new source of workers. Africans were deemed suitable for work in the Americas because they were unfamiliar with the land and so less likely to escape, largely resistant to European diseases, accustomed to laboring in the tropics, and came from farming cultures.

Detailed explanation-3: -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-4: -The cultural, demographic and economic foundations of the Atlantic slave trade. There were three reasons that shaped the demand and supply of slaves across the Atlantic, each situated in another continent.

Detailed explanation-5: -The destinations of slaves taken to the Americas were equally diverse. Slavers carried most of the Africans caught up in the trade to Brazil (approximately five million), with another 2.25 million sent to the British Caribbean, and about 1.75 million to the French Caribbean. Most of the rest landed in Spanish America.