How did the Atlantic Slave Trade influence Africa?

Answer 1

The Slave Trade was between Europeans and Africans, where Africans sold their own people into slavery mainly for weapons. From here, the Europeans then transported their new slaves to their colonies in the New World. Its profits were obviously of labor usage, which led mainly to agricultural production, which led to money.

Answer 2

The Atlantic slave trade influenced Africa because millions of Africans were transported to the Americas to work on plantations. The trade thus reduced the population in parts of Africa. The seizure of captives for sale set Africans against each other and disrupted societies across the continent. The cause of suppressing slave trading later gave Europeans a pretext for intervention and colonisation.

Answer 3

In the days before the industrial revolution, it required a lot of time to do things because doing things by hand was very slow. It also meant that people's time was worth less, even though they had less time to invest in work, due to shorter life spans, and the fact that everything was so slow.

For this reason, large scale production was insanely expensive, and earned so little you couldn't hire anyone. THAT is why slavery was so common for most of human kind's history. The early mass production of cotton and sugar in this country would not have been possible with modern economic work practices. This was not only true in Europe and the New World. It was true all over the world.

In fact, one could argue that the slave traders made a great deal more money than those who used the slaves themselves. Farming was only really profitable if you did it on a large scale, and even then, there was a lot of overhead. (Overhead means that it costs a lot to do, so you make less money doing it, because most of the money goes back into production)

However, the Africans back in Africa also profited. They often went to war for financial reasons to gain captives from neighboring tribes they could sell into slavery. They also got European weapons and other goods in trade. However, it must be understood that these practices had been in place for a very long time... European involvement just created a boom in the 'business'.

One can argue that it was the Industrial Revolution as much as European religious values that killed slavery as an institution in the West. Machines mean that you can do more with less time, and that means that people themselves get more money, and more production out of what time they do spend.

Answer 4

European slave traders did allot of harm to Africa by kidnapping ordinary tribes people and taking them to the New World to be sold as slaves. In some cases the slave traders caused rifts and tensions among the African native tribes by bribing the chiefs of certain tribes to hand over their own people to the traders. Another problem not seen by many observers was that because African native tribes people made viable slaves, the Europeans, in Europe and abroad were given the impression that Africans were not people equal to themselves but were commodities to be used for profit.