Summary Of Prepossessed Of The Opinion By John Barbot

The passage, “Prepossessed of the Opinion” by John Barbot, is a memorandum written in 1732 of the Atlantic Slave Trade and of the things Barbot saw to the Africans being transported to the Americas. Barbot was an agent for the French Royal African Company ( a slave trade company) that went on at least to voyages to the West Coast of Africa. This document was most likely written for historians or adults that wanted to learn about the Atlantic Slave Trade.Three important things that Barbot said in the reading are: that kings of an African country would sentence an offender of the law to be made a slave no matter their rank, that the trade of slaves is in a more peculiar manner the business of kings, rich men, and prime merchants, is exclusive

This is important because this means that no matter how small of how big a crime that you would have made, you would have been sent away from your homeland to be tortured and beaten and worked for the rest of your life without any mercy. The next important part of the passage is where Barbot said that only the higher ranked officials (kings, rich men, and merchants) were usually the ones that would sell the slaves and not the “inferior sort of blacks”. This reason is important because it proves that if you were poor of of a different skin tone, you did not have the same abilities as would a rich person or a high ranked official and that you were looked down upon by the higher people. The last important thing from the text was how when the prisoners would be branded with a ho iron to let the owners know who was who, the women were still held with caution and would not be branded as hard. This is important because it shows that the traders still had some humanity left in them and would not have let the women be branded just as hard as the