What made white people want slavery?

Answer 1

White is the general racial name for European. To narrow the question to about 15% of the Africans taken to the Americas for slavery, we can look at how slavery came to be in the United States. In the Mediterranean Sea, there are islands which were developed for the cash crop of sugar. The system of production and the machines used to process the sugar cane were introduced from the practices learned in the Middle East during the Crusades. The developers found that if they imported workers, they could work gangs of many more field laborers at the same pace under a very few supervising overseers. The sugar cultivation spread west through the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic Ocean. When America was discovered, sugar production was a source of revenue to Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonizers. When the English first began colonization, most of the laborers were indentures set free after a term of service. For the first thirty years in colonial Virginia, African Angolans and African-Americans from the Spanish New World were freed on the same basis as other Christians from England. After Bacon's Rebellion and a shortage of indentures, plantations of tobacco were expanded with lifelong slaves of African descent in Virginia and later everywhere south of Pennsylvania. Later, everywhere south of Pennsylvania "Mason-Dixon Line" where slavery provided the largest farming incomes was called "The South". By 1860, 85% of slaves held in the US were field hands on cotton plantations in the "Deep South", providing the largest value of US exports. At the creation of the United States, slavery was permitted to bring the southern English colonies in North America to the new Union. Social historians have documented a persistent racism in US history. Even those of European descent who objected to slavery saw it as a "necessary evil" to make a continuous country reaching "continentally". At the Constitution, Congress was authorized to restrict slavery beginning in twenty years, and so a majority did, beginning in 1807 by outlawing the African slave trade (The Middle Passage). The Treaty of Ghent in 1814 between the US and Britain to end the War of 1812 said "...the Traffic in Slaves is irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice..." The whites of the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833. Majorities in the US continued limiting it in various ways until they abolished slavery by the end of 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment.

Answer 2

White people wanted slavery for economic reasons, as it provided cheap labor for crops like tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane in the Americas. Additionally, racist ideologies and beliefs in white supremacy fueled the justification for the subjugation of Black people as a means to maintain power and control.