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The colonization of the New World involved several groups—Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. The interactions between these different continents and peoples contributed to the creation of what historians now call the Atlantic World. Everyone brought in their own assumptions, worldviews, and ideas. In the process, these groups contributed to the creation of societies in the Americas that Christopher Columbus and other early explorers would not have anticipated.
The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English empires that competed to establish footholds in the Americas were driven by political and religious impulses as well as by desires for economic gain. Yet, in order to extract wealth from the New World, Europeans needed to find or establish valuable commodities in the region and, more importantly, organize labor to produce these products.
By the mid-17th century, the geopolitical map of the Americas would become a patchwork of imperial designs and ambitions as the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English reinforced their claims to parts of the land. The economic influence behind much of these efforts was known as mercantilism.
Mercantilism rested on two key assumptions. First, European monarchs and their supporters believed that the world comprised competing nations rather than competing individuals. Second, they assumed that there existed only a fixed amount of wealth in the world, as measured by a nation's holdings of gold and silver. In order to survive and prosper, monarchs believed that their nations needed to acquire more colonies and their natural resources. Therefore, mercantilism influenced empire-building projects across the New World, with European powers vying with each other to gain their own economic footholds in the Americas.
According to mercantilism, the ideal condition of a nation was to be self-sufficient. A central government would manage the economy. Colonies would produce precious minerals, other raw materials, and commodities. Then, ships transported these materials and commodities across the Atlantic for consumption in Europe.
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Gold and silver mined in Central Mexico would go only to Spain, sugarcane from Brazil would go only to Portugal, and tobacco grown in Virginia would go only to England.Trade within a mercantilist economy and, therefore, the creation of wealth for Europe, depended upon the idea that each colony (and the peoples within them) played a specific role. In particular, European colonists, Indigenous Peoples, and laborers trafficked across the Atlantic bore the burden of producing valuable commodities for the benefit of distant European nations.
By the middle of the 16th century, Africans formed an important element of the labor landscape of the Atlantic World. Denied control over their lives, enslaved Africans endured horrendous conditions while crossing the Atlantic Ocean and working on plantations to produce cash crops, such as sugar and tobacco, for European markets. At every opportunity, they resisted enslavement, and their resistance was met with violence. Indeed, physical, mental, and sexual violence formed a key strategy among European slaveholders in their effort to assert mastery and impose their will.
The Portuguese led the way in the evolving transport of enslaved men, women, and children across the Atlantic. They encouraged African rulers to go to war with each other and enslave the enemy on their behalf. Enslaved individuals, most of whom were captured in the interior by other Africans, were then sold to Europeans on terms agreed to by African sellers. In return for gold, ivory, and enslaved people, African merchants received European guns, horses, iron, copper, glass, rum, textiles, and other goods. Centers of trade in enslaved people on the western coast of Africa, such as Elmina Castle in Ghana, served as holding pens for people brought from Africa’s interior. In time, other European powers, most notably the Dutch and the English, built upon the Portuguese model by conquering these centers (the Dutch seized Elmina Castle by 1637, for instance) or by constructing similar outposts on the coast of West Africa.
The transport of enslaved Africans to the Americas accelerated in the 1600s, and by the middle of the 17th century, the English dominated the trade. By 1660, Charles II created the Royal African Company, and its sole purpose was to trade in enslaved human beings. Charles’s brother, James II, led the company before ascending the throne himself. Under both these kings, the Royal African Company enjoyed a monopoly over the transport of enslaved humans to English colonies in the Americas.
Between 1672 and 1713, the company bought 125,000 captives on the African coast, losing 20% of them to death on the Middle Passage, the journey from the African coast to the Americas.
Once sold to traders, all enslaved Africans sent to America endured the hellish Middle Passage, the transatlantic crossing, which took one to two months. An astonishing number, some four million human beings, were transported to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage between 1501 and 1830. Africans who survived such violence and the brutality of the Middle Passage usually arrived in the West Indies, often in Barbados. From there, they were transported to the mainland English colonies on company ships. While merchants in London, Bristol, and Liverpool lined their pockets, Africans trafficked by the company endured a nightmare of misery, privation, and dislocation.
Additional Resources
Track the geography and timeline of the transatlantic trade in enslaved humans and view 3D renderings of slaving vessels at Slavevoyages.org, a digital initiative that compiles publicly available records of the forced relocation of African people.
Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders sold enslaved Africans in colonies throughout the Americas, particularly in South America and the Caribbean.
Here, sugar was a primary export. Thousands of enslaved Africans found themselves forced to grow, harvest, and process sugar cane in an arduous routine of physical labor. Enslaved workers had to cut the long cane stalks by hand and then bring them to a mill, where the cane juice was extracted. They boiled the extracted cane juice down to a brown, crystalline sugar, which then had to be cured in special curing houses to have the molasses drained from it. The result was refined sugar, while the leftover molasses could be distilled into rum. Every step was labor-intensive and often dangerous.
The use of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean Islands for the production of commodities such as sugar contributed to an economic relationship that historians have traditionally called the triangular trade system. Enslavers originating from European nations such as England and Portugal invested in the purchase of people along the coast of West Africa. These enslaved people were brought to the New World, where they labored on plantations and processed raw goods such as sugar cane into more refined commodities, the production of which was for the sole benefit of the European country. These commodities were then shipped to consumers throughout Europe or underwent another refining process, where the capital and goods gained from these transactions would ultimately go back into the purchasing of more enslaved laborers. It was a vicious, triangular system of exploitation, profit, and violence.
Mercantilism, the trade of enslaved Africans, and the general rise in commodity exchanges, such as those associated with sugar, also contributed to a number of cultural and intellectual relationships that, when combined with the economic connections of the triangular trade, contributed to the emergence of an Atlantic World. Similar to the triangular trade system, the Atlantic World refers to the rapid increase in trade, the exchange of enslaved humans, and the rise of new forms of consumerism that contributed to a growing Atlantic marketplace.
Such exchanges allowed colonists in the New World to maintain connections with their respective mother countries and still consider themselves European while they produced valuable commodities, such as sugar. Another important result of these interactions was the creation of a system in which Europeans considered enslaved Africans as commodities rather than human beings. Enslavers viewed enslaved people in terms of profitability and the potential economic yield that they represented.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
