yet there was an “industrial revolution” during slavery in US. “by and large” was the key phrase there.
all “transatlantic trade” was unique because people were now trading with the “new world”
I wouldn’t say fortunate.
You got 30-40 years of abuse instead of 5 depending on the slave owner and overseers’ temperament. All slave owners were horrid people (they were slavers after all) but some were less abusive than others.
As a slave being brought to the new world, you wanted to end up on the continent itself. Either North America, Latin America, or Portuguese America, where sugar wasn’t the central crop.
Where you didn’t want to end up was the Caribbean, specifically the sugar colonies like Jamaica or Saint Domingue.
Sugar was so valuable that any sense of “morality” (if such a thing existed among slavers) went flying out the window and they worked you to death. Literally. Either that or Yellow Fever killed you off in one or two years.
But I wouldn’t call them fortunate. I’d say less awful.
It was unprecedented in that western Europeans eventually ended government-supported slavery world wide.
Justification for slavery certainly took on a huge racist component in the US. From what I see that was a result of the cognitive dissonance between the revolutionary idea that “all men are created equal” and a slave-dependent economy in the South. The only way to reconcile the two ideas was make Africans less than fully human.
Outside of America, there was little connection between race and slavery. For example, about 20 million out of a total population of at total population of 74 million were serfs in Russia at the time of the US Civil War. In India, there were 9 million slaves out of population of about 40 million around that time. Slavery was also widely practiced in China. In these countries, virtually none of the slaves came from Africa, and the vast majority were native to the countries where they were enslaved.
Without western Europeans, would slavery still exist throughout the world?
“would slavery still exist throughout the world?”
When has is stopped exactly? - Throughout the world; which is a very big wild place.
Illicit slavery still exists, but Government-supported slavery is gone worldwide. Mauritania was the last country in the world to outlaw slavery in 1981, but slavery is still practiced there.
For reference Mauritania is a Muslim country located in the southwest portion of the Sahara desert. The French outlawed slavery there in 1905, but it returned after the country a gained independence in 1960.
Is ending slavery in Mauritania a form of cultural imperialism?
