AP World History Eleanor Roosevelt High SchoolMr. Spear

Name: ______________________________________________________ Date: ____________________

Activity Guide 7Unit 13: Absolutism, Enlightenment and Empire (1530-1770)

DO NOW

Two Versions of Triangular Trade

1. According the images above, to what does the term Triangular Trade refer?____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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2. State the name of the European kingdom that colonized each of the sugar colonies listed at left below.

Sugar Plantations European KingdomJamaica

San Domingue (Haiti)Cuba

HispaniolaPuerto Rico

BrazilBarbados

AIM: How did the Atlantic economy operate in the 16th century?____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Reading 1In the 15th and 16th centuries the Portuguese and Dutch built an extensive trading empire in the Indian Ocean. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French built and equally extensive empire in the Atlantic. One of the most profitable products to come from the New World was sugarcane. Sugarcane is not a native plant to the Americas. Europeans were familiar with sugar before the conquest because it was grown in parts of Africa and the Portuguese Azores and Canary Islands. It was extraordinarily expensive before the conquest, however, and few Europeans could afford it. The Europeans brought sugarcane to Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean because they knew that the climate, rainfall and long growing season of those regions would allow them to produce sugar in vast quantities. Once plantation owners were able to produce sugar in large quantities, they marketed it to a broader portion of the European public, and the European public quickly decided that they liked sugar. In addition to providing sweet flavoring to an otherwise bland diet, sugar provided quick calories and energy to a people accustomed to working long hours in fields and workshops.

Sugarcane is not easy to produce because it is extraordinarily labor-intensive. It is difficult to harvest and must be processed before it can be sold. The canes are very hard, almost like wood, and they must be cut down with machetes. After being harvested, the canes must be quickly pressed in order to extract the sweet juice inside them and then that juice must be boiled so that it crystallizes.

Europeans in Brazil and the Caribbean initially tried to grow sugarcane by enslaving natives Indians. When this proved unsuccessful because the natives died of disease, plantation owners experimented with indentured servitude. Poor whites from Europe were given free passage to the New World if they agreed to work a certain number of years without pay. Indentured servitude also proved unsuccessful, however, because land was scarce on the islands of the Caribbean and it was not possible to promise indentured servants free or cheap land once they were released from service. As a result, most poor whites chose to indenture themselves to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia where land was more plentiful. This led sugar growers in the Caribbean to begin importing African slaves. In Brazil, using indentured servants to grow sugar probably could have worked because there was plentiful free land to offer them after their term of service, but it soon became apparent to Brazilian growers there that African slaves were cheaper.

1. Why was there such a tremendous demand for sugar in Europe?

2. Why was producing cane sugar so labor-intensive?

3. Why did sugar producers in Brazil and the Caribbean begin importing African slaves?

4. If sugar was so profitable, why do you think that sugar producers did not simply pay their workers?Triangular Trade

Reading 2The result of the discovery that enslaving Africans was the most profitable solution to the labor requirements of the sugar industry was that over the next 300 years, more than 9 million slaves were imported from Africa to plantations in the Americas. Historians refer to the journey that captives made from Africa to the New World aboard ship as the Middle Passage. The term is derived from the fact that the journey across the Atlantic was the middle section of a three-leg “Triangular Trade” route that European merchants used when conducting Atlantic trade. The Middle Passage was brutal. Hundreds of slaves were chained below the decks of slave ships lying in compartments not much larger than coffins. The voyage took 6-10 weeks and each slave was allowed only 30 minutes per day above deck to eat a small portion of boiled corn. They were even forced to relieve themselves in their compartments and to remain laying in their own waste for the duration of the voyage. Needless to say, over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans died during the Middle Passage, mostly from disease.

1. Why do you think that it was possible that Europeans could engage in something as inhumane as the slave trade? What practices do you think Americans engage in today that future generations will judge harshly?

Activity 1

Watch the excerpt depicting the Middle Passage in the 1997 film Amistad and answer the questions below.

1. What behavior on the part of the ship’s crew seems strange or inexplicable? Why do you think the crew engaged in these actions?

2. What are some of the ways that the slaves aboard ship responded to their captivity?

3. For what products were the slaves traded in the New World?

Reading 3One factor that complicates judging the European slave trade harshly is the fact that many African leaders were willing accomplices in it. In the 17th and 18th centuries Europeans did not possess colonies in Africa. Like they had in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese merely established coastal trading ports in Africa with the permission of local rulers. From those forts, they traded products like textiles, cooking utensils, guns and rum with African rulers who provided them with slaves they had captured in war.

One reason that the rulers were not hesitant to sell their fellow Africans into bondage was that the foreign slave trade had been well established by the Muslim Caliphates of North Africa long before the Europeans arrived. For at least a century prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Muslim traders had been crossing the Sahara desert, buying Black slaves in Sub-Saharan Africa, and then marching them back across the desert. It is likely that this forced march across the Sahara was at least as miserable and deadly as the European’s Middle Passage. Historians estimate that as many as one million Africans entered into slavery in this manner.

1. What was the name of the Muslim Empire that ruled North Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries?

2. One reason that Africa was able to provide such a large number of slaves to European and Islamic traders was that Africa’s population spiked at precisely the same time that the slave trade did. In what ways might the discovery of the New World have caused that spike in population?

3. Do you think the fact that some African rulers were complicit in the slave trade mitigates the Europeans’ responsibility for having engaged in it? Why or why not?