Topic > Historical Context of Slavery in America: The Question of Race

Slavery continues to impact America in the most basic economic sense. An economic structure – a method of creating and exchanging goods – American slavery was generally not the same as the rest of the advanced economy and was separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white foreigners and intelligent designers, however, they forget about cotton fields and slave labor. This view implies that slavery did not change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term impact on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the country transitioned from from a small European trading partner to becoming the largest economy in the world: one of the crucial accounts of American history. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay With the rise of plantation systems and cash crop economies in the late 17th and 18th centuries, slaveholders had the financial muscle to authorize racial orders to ensure the enslavement of Africans, while protecting the benefits and opportunities for white Europeans. The transition from small-scale cultivation to mechanical agriculture changed the way of life of these social orders, as their financial prosperity was based on the plantation. Until the cancellation of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, more than 12 million Africans were shipped to the New World, and more than 90 percent of them went to the Caribbean and South America, many to work on sugar plantations. Throughout the New World, plantations transformed into an organization in their own right, represented by social and political inequality, racial conflict, and the domination of the planter class. African slaves – initially involved in intertribal fighting but later legitimately available for purchase in what developed into a rewarding slave trade – were sold and shipped to the Americas to serve as labor for European colonial enterprises. This African slavery was determined not by a feeling of racial inferiority, but to satisfy the needs of labor. Although not profitable at first, the esteem of African slaves themselves, as well as the rise of new European tastes – and a market – for American-made products, such as chocolate and tobacco, inevitably led to a gigantic and profitable trans-activity agreement. Atlantic trade. European ships transported supplies to African slave ports. From that time, shiploads of captured slaves were sent to the Americas from Africa, where the people who endured the terrible journey were sold as property. Plantations, part of another system and system of agricultural creation, purchased these slaves in large numbers to work in the fields that produced rice, indigo, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar for return to Europe. Slaves made up such a large part of the population and their labor such an important part of the economy of these settlements that historians currently call them "slave social orders". The “race,” as it was created in these colonial slave societies, was not the same as the one that was created in the United States. From the beginning, free labor was used in regions of North America, particularly for immigrants fleeing religious persecution. Before long, however, the benefits of the slave trade proved attractive, and English plantation owners continued to organize and finance expeditions to the African coast. TheEnglish slave trading was initially organized through state-sponsored organizations. From the beginning, however, intruders have attempted to infiltrate these trading restrictions. Like others before them, the English discovered that the path to expanding their slave trade was to be found in the Americas. Serfdom caused racism, but financial intentions, not racial motivations, caused slavery. The penchant for plantation slavery was linked to the promotion of free enterprise; the choice to import large numbers of Africans and hold them in congenital servitude depended on the fact that oppressed Africans were cheaper than some other type of labor then accessible. Like most monumental changes, the inconveniences of hereditary racial slavery were progressive, gradually over numerous decades. It continued gradually. The brutal conditions and low life expectancy of settlers in Virginia inevitably changed as settlers found they were more familiar with the climate and environment. The expansion of survival and the progressive increase of settlers led to the development of the population and the growing interest in land, which proved to be increasingly scarce and further eliminated from access to roads and water transport, both essential for agricultural trade. Landholdings in Virginia extended from the Tidewater area, characterized by fertile soils and effectively safe waterways, to the less affluent lands of the lower Piedmont regions and beyond, where they clashed with the regional interests of indigenous groups. Volatile tensions developed as the settlement developed and decades passed, exploding in 1676 in what became known as Bacon's Rebellion. Initially, a contest between William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia, and Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy settler in the colony of Virginia, and land and Indian relations in the western part of the colony, the rebellion began to worry about class and race when Bacon went east. in Jamestown, the colonial capital. Now pardoned by Berkeley, Bacon returned with the force and vowed to free slaves and indentured servants who joined his cause, as Berkeley did, but less effectively. His followers took and burned Jamestown and temporarily controlled the colony. The rebellion itself proved short-lived when Bacon died unexpectedly a month later and a large number of his followers were executed, but its larger implications remained. Beyond Bacon's particular problems, the alliance between poor whites and African slaves and freedmen in his rebellion aroused greater concern that such an alliance might be a continuing cause of further revolts and class revolts. Lifetime servitude could be maintained simply by eliminating the possibility that an individual could be free through Christian transformation. One approach has been to ban this usual path to opportunity. As early as 1664, a Maryland statute indicated that Christian sanctification could not affect a slave's legal status. One solution, however, involved eliminating religion inside and out as a determining factor in servitude. Thus, another essential key to the horrific change was the shift from changing spiritual confidence to unchanging physical appearance as a measure of status. Progressively, the predominant English came to see Africans not as "barbarous people", but as "black people". They began to present themselves not as Christians, but as whites. Furthermore, they gradually incorporated this move into their colonial laws. Within a generation, the -.