The Atlantic World: Slave Trade During the fifteenth century, Europeans started to colonize the Americas; North, South, and the Caribbean. While this period of colonization was occurring, the demand for cheap labor and money was consistently growing. Europeans attempted to use various different sources for slavery, such as Native Americans, but the numerous flaws with these other societies resulted in Europeans using African people as slaves. During the period of Atlantic slave trade, many issues contributed to the result of using Africans as slaves in the New World as well as effects for using them. These different causes and effects led to a great percent of African population to go to the Americas, and racism that lasted hundreds of years and still exists in today’s society. Europeans had many sugar and tobacco plantations, these plantations needed a sizable workforce in order for their fields and plantations to be profitable. The Europeans wanted more money, their solution to this was cheap labor. Their first approach to cheap labor was enslaving the Native Americans. The Natives had farming experience …show more content…
The Africans had farming experience and they had built a resistance to tropical diseases, due to the fact that they were already living in tropical land. They were not native to the New World so they did not know the land and could not escape easily. Even if the slaves did escape, they could be found easily because of their dark colored skin, they didn’t fit in with the lighter colors. The Europeans also made the Africans more accessible by giving African leaders and merchants things like goods and guns in exchange for these leaders in merchants bringing slaves to the Europeans at slave ports, so the Europeans didn’t have travel on land to get slaves