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Atlantic Slave Trade Essay

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Atlantic Slave Trade Essay
My initial research question, "To what extent did Africa contribute to the Atlantic Slave Trade", can be answered by the two scholarly sources I had picked out. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade had been taught in schools over many, many years. Many people would had inferred that the Europeans were the ones to blame, but after more extensive research into that topic, it would appear not so. It had been concluded that Africa's own inhabitants and Portuguese had contributed to the famous Atlantic Slave Trade. So, that left me with the question, "To what extent did Africa contribute to the Atlantic Slave Trade"? My two scholarly sources ("Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies" and “A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade”) had aided in proving that Africa …show more content…
They had agreed that the Africans used their self-interest to push themselves into the Slave Trade and that slavery existed before the Europeans came. Some points that these two sources may disagree on is that the scholar Eltis ("Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies") had written this article with purpose of informing his readers that the trans-Atlantic slave trade grew from a strong demand for labor in the Americas, because Amerindians died in large numbers, it ensured that the labor would comprise mainly slaves from Africa. The agency of Africans comprised a fourth major influence, and the African merchants who traded slaves on the coast to European ship all had strict conceptions of what made an individual eligible for enslavement. Among such criteria were constructions of gender, definitions of criminal behavior, and conventions for dealing with prisoners of war (Eltis 4-6). In the other source, by Hakim Adi, he didn’t mention the idea that the dying numbers of other slave tribes had contributed to the
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