Transatlantic Slave Trade

It was also a trade which operated over a very long period. It began in a sense even before the discovery of America: the Portuguese were buying slaves on the coast of West Africa from 1444 on (Reynolds 7). At about the same time, the plantation economy which would be the basis of the slave system was also being developed on the newly discovered Atlantic islands of the Canaries, Cape Verdes, and Azores. After 1492, the same activity was simply extended to the New World, on a much larger scale.

The trade operated for four centuries, coming to an end only after the American civil war (slavery lasted into the 1880s in Brazil). The slave trade (and the slave-plantation system it supported) was never more extensive or profitable than in the decades just before and after 1800. Yet in 1807 the British outlawed the slave trade, and suppression of the trade was a major activity of the British Navy in the decades after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. What brought an end to this profitable trade? Was it moral revulsion? Economic development? or a complex admixture of

. . .
the tax base of the State. Policies such as Enclosure at home and the development of slave colonies abroad both tended to support the development of such a cash economy, and in the contemporary view thus redounded to the national advantage. As late as 1800, the "plantation sector" was a major and thriving sector of the British mercantile economy, perhaps more important than the nascent industrial sector (Eltis 3-8). By contrast, there was no profit in establishing colonies of free subsistence farmers, whose cash contributions to the metropolitan power were minimal. The Northern colonies of the future United States were founded largely as religious refuges, were of relatively little interest to Britain save as geopolitical tokens in the struggle with France, and were generally slower to develop than the Southern colonies. By the late 18th century, however, a number of new social and economic factors were beginning--indirectly, at first--to undercut the slave economy and the slave trade that fed it. Adam Smith was one of the first to realize that while the wages of workers were a cost to the individual employer, higher wages for labor would increase the overall level of economic activity and thus be profitable to businesses i
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Apart Spanish, Policies Enclosure, Evangelical Christians, British Navy, Adam Smith, United States--where, Napoleonic Wars, Verdes Azores, United Brazil, West Africa, slave trade, cash economy, british navy, baton rouge louisiana, rouge louisiana, free labor, napoleonic wars, trade york, trade operated, baton rouge, transatlantic slave trade, slave trade york, plantation sector,
Approximate Word count = 1248
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)