ANALYSIS THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE IN 15th and 16TH CENTURY.

Slavery in Africa and a trans-Saharan slave trade had existed for centuries before
the Atlantic traffic began. Conditions in seventeenth-century West Africa were
capable of supporting a vast expansion of the slave trade should the opportunity
arise. "Opportunity" here implies (1) a new effective demand for slaves, (2) an
increase in the incentives for slave gathering, and (3) reductions in the collection and
transport costs of slaves, both internally and externally, as a result of technical
change.
A fourfold expansion of annual slave shipments between 1650 and 1800 met the
demand for gang labour in the cultivation of major New World crops: tobacco, cotton,
and, above all, sugar. The increase in incentives for slave gathering is equally plain.
The new demand for Africa's slaves was matched by a rapidly increasing African
demand for imports.
Transatlantic traders introduced a wide range of new goods into West Africa: items
such as textiles, salt, knives, iron and copper, brassware, and liquor were staples of
the import trade. The great expansion in the import of those goods to Africa in the
eighteenth century was (mostly) a direct result of the slave trade. The geographical
area of large-scale slave gathering was widened; the services of professional
middlemen and mercenaries were employed; transfer camps and depots were
established on major routes; safe passage, often involving toll arrangements, was
negotiated across foreign territory; and armed patrols were used for protection and
convoy on the long-distance trade routes. Slaves destined for export were also used
as carriers of export produce, and it is even possible that in some areas organized
gathering on a regional cycle, bearing some resemblance to the management of a
modern fishery or forest, was undertaken.
Other major technical changes affected the "capital stock" of African slave dealers
and increased their efficiency of operation. The central innovation was the
widespread use of firearms in the eighteenth century. An improved method of
ignition-the flintlock-was invented in France about 1610-1615 which had become the
standard firearm by 1690s along the Gold and Slave coasts of Africa.
Innovation also extended to the movement of slaves following capture. A completely
new crop, maize, probably introduced by the Portuguese from Brazil, became an
essential item in the slave trade. As much as 10,000 tonnes a year supported the
trade at its peak, the volume having risen from nothing before the sixteenth century
when maize was unknown in Africa. At the coasts a class of black professionals
arose to overcome the problems of trans-shipment to oceangoing vessels. With safe
harbours so rare along the coast, slavers relied on skilled pilots for navigating the
creeks and on skilled surfboat crews for loading.
Important financial innovations included the increasing use of money and credit both
between Europeans and Africans and among Africans themselves. The availability
of money and credit contributed to the expansion and regularization of commercial
contacts. another innovation, which by cutting the turnaround time for ships also
reduced costs and lowered the slave mortality rate, was balking-the collection of ship
load lots by entrepreneurs ashore and their sale as a unit. New shipboard hygienic
measures such as ventilation, the use of vinegar, and the open deck house for slave
storage account for a decline in the death rate for slaves in ocean transit by more
than one-half between the seventeenth century and the end of the legal trade in
1807.
New technology also defeated the problem of damage from the marine worm,
Teredo navalis, which eats away the timbers of wooden ships in tropical waters.
After 1777 many ships in the African trade received a sheathing of copper that
lengthened their lives considerably. Slave wholesalers began operating in the
Americas, so that by the eighteenth-century ship- load lots could be disposed of to
wholesale dealers through a system that was the counterpart of balking on the
African coast. The result was a cut in turn- around time for ships in the West Indies
from fifty-two days in the 1690s to twenty-three days in 1773.
Newly slaves were absorbed into copper mines, agricultural field etc. Bozales were
black slave who were not similar with Iberian culture and brought straight from Africa
to America whereas Ladinos were black slaves who were in high demand due to
their similarity with Iberian culture, who were transported from European countries
and then to America and most of them were converted to Christian. As the work
intensified in the mining and plantation in America the demand for Bozales and
Ladinos increased and their condition deteriorates. With time as work become cruel
there was slave resistance.
The example of most prominent way of slave resistance comes from PALANQUES
(marron communities) These emerges on the periphery of mining towns and marine
towns. These are run away slaves who become targets of Spanish raids.
The slave trade had devastating effects in Africa. Economic incentives for warlords
and tribes to engage in the slave trade promoted an atmosphere of lawlessness and
violence. Depopulation and a continuing fear of captivity made economic and
agricultural development almost impossible throughout much of western Africa. A
large percentage of the people taken captive in Africa were women in their
childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families.
The transatlantic slave trade generated great wealth for many individuals,
companies, and countries, but the brutal trafficking in human beings and the large
numbers of deaths that resulted eventually sparked well-organized opposition to the
trade. In 1807 the British abolished the slave trade. An act banning the importation
of slaves into the United States was passed by Congress in 1808. By the 1820s
other countries such as Spain, Holland, Sweden, and France had also passed laws
against the slave trade. Additional laws and ongoing enforcement efforts finally
succeeded in ending the transatlantic slave trade in the late 19th century

PLANTATION AND MINING ECONOMICS OF AMERICA

For the first century and a half, Phillips writes, domestic and industrial slavery
coexisted in Latin America, but after the middle of the seventeenth century the
demand for slaves came almost exclusively from the plantation and mining sectors,
and gang labour became the predominant form of slavery in Latin America. Both
mining and sugar producing required enormous amounts of labour and a far more
complex, interdependent economic system than the Spanish and Portuguese first
realized.
Early Atlantic plantations were established in Brazil in the seventeenth century and in
the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Jamaica, Saint Domingue (Haiti) in the
eighteenth century.
Dependent on largely slave labour, these plantations overtime came to serve the
European markets, initially as a supplement and later as main supplier of prime
agricultural produces and food grains. 
According to Philip D. Curtin, certain common characteristics can be discerned while
analysing these early plantation colonies. 
1) First and most importantly the productive labour force in these societies is slave
labour.
 2) Secondly, the population of these settlement societies was not self-sustaining,
and this holds true for both the African slaves and the European settlers. The death
rate in these colonies was consistently high and the numbers of both the African and
non-African demographics must be maintained by regular immigration from Europe
or in form of slave inflow from Africa. This high rate of death over birth, remained a
constant factor in social life of Atlantic colonies for until about the middle of the 19th
century. 
3) Thirdly, the agricultural enterprise was organised in large scale plantations.
Typically, the worker strength of these plantations was around 50 to 100 workers on
a single farm, far larger than the European spaces at the same time. The owner of
the plantation controlled and managed all steps of production with the assistance of
his agents. While in the farm itself almost all aspects of daily life, be it family or
related to production, was organised and regulated by the owner himself. This was
very much different than what was organised in European farms. 
4) Fourth, though capitalist in its nature, the farm itself has some feudal
characteristics. For e.g. the ownership of the slaves and exercise of certain rights
which were legally defined and exercisable.
5) Fifth, the plantations were created to supply a distant market with a highly
specialised product – mainly sugar, and then coffee and cotton. Since the success of
the plantation was in the success to export the produce, at times most of the produce
was exported and there was very little left to feed the local population. Hence much
of these plantations were dependent upon the supplies of food grains, eatables, and
slaves provided by long distance traders.
6) As a result of the rivalries to dominate the trade and flow of traffic of slaves and
commodities like sugar to and from the colonies, the nature of political control of the
home country on the colonies was inherently fragmented and prone to tensions.

Discovery of gold in the mountains of Minas Gerais in south-central Brazil in 1695

opened up entirely new visions of colonial wealth, and by the turn of the eighteenth
century, thousands of Portuguese prospectors were rushing to the mining district and
drawing tens of thousands of African slaves after them. In Peru, the rise of the
mining economy put an end to the colonists' move toward autonomy and stimulated
integration of Spanish America markets into European trade. After the mining
production in Spanish America and the connection of slave trade with Brazil would
the dynamics of the Atlantic system come to involve Iberian possessions in Africa
and America. The reorganization of mining started in the fifteenth century when the
merchant capitalists took control of production. So long as mining was carried out to
extract minerals lying closer to the surface, it did not require advanced technology or
heavy finances. Deeper mining needed the installation and maintenance of
expensive equipment.
CONCLUSION
From its early inception in the early 12th century in a relatively known Mediterranean
environment, plantations as a system of management and commercial cropping
underwent large scale transformation over the centuries to emerge as the backbone
of the colonial investments by the European countries in the Americas. Crops such
as Sugar cane, tobacco, indigo, rice came to be grown on a large scale and
transported to Europe to augment the limited agricultural possibilities in Europe itself.
The Spanish mining in America and the Portuguese commercial ventures led to the
exploitation and extraction of riches. As mining was a capital-intensive activity, it
required heavy investments and thereby created favourable conditions for the growth
of capitalism. Technical innovation, the growing scale of production, and capital
investment transformed plantation ownership and financing. Local planter classes
were increasingly subordinated to or eliminated by corporate capital as plantations
were integrated into production, marketing, and financial networks dominated by
transnational enterprises. The plantation lost its distinctive character and came to
resemble other forms of large-scale capitalist agriculture.