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Why Did Europeans Enter The Slave Trade Research Paper

919 Words4 Pages

Hayley Lunsford March 8, 2016
Question - Why did so many European nations enter the African Slave Trade?
Thesis - Many European nations had entered the slave trade because they needed cheap labor for work they didn’t want to do, also they traded slaves for gold, spices, textiles, metalwork, rum, tobacco, weapons and gunpowder.

Intro Paragraph
The European Nations had just entered the Slave Trade. The question is, why did they enter the Slave Trade? When regular materials just weren't enough to trade, actual human people were sacrificed. When there was just too much work and it was just too hard, they had forced laborers called slaves to do it for them. Human greed has always been a big part of life. We yearn for wealth and materialistic …show more content…

European traders had previously been interested in African nations and kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, due to their sophisticated trading networks. Traders then wanted to trade human beings.” Europeans Nations who had entered America were brought there by the idea of owning their own land. The problem was, they were reluctant to work for others. Convicts from Britain were sent from Britain to work on the plantations but there were never enough convicts. In order to fulfill the extremely large demand for labour, planters purchased slaves. When they wanted to trade slaves, they would offer certain goods such as gold, spices, rum, tobacco, etc. They wanted the enslaved people to work in mines and on some tobacco plantations in South America and also on sugar plantations in the West Indies. Millions of Africans were enslaved and forced across the Atlantic to labour in plantations in the Caribbean and …show more content…

During warfare was a common source of increasing slave numbers in Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and Angola. The raiding and kidnapping aspect seemed to have been the dominant result in the Slave Coast. “The enslaved Africans comprised a mixture of ethnic groups. However after 1660, two thirds of Africans carried away by British ships came from just three regions - the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast and Central Africa. Within the Bight of Biafra just two venues - Old Calabar on the Cross River and Bonny in the Niger Delta - supplied the great majority of slaves entering British ships. Overall, Igbos from the Bight of Biafra constituted probably the largest single ethnic group of enslaved Africans entering the British Slave Trade, followed by Akan from the Gold Coast and Bantu from central

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