What was the primary reason for the rapid increase in the importation of Africans in 16th century Brazil and the Caribbean?
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The American Historical Review Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1988) , pp. 936-959 (24 pages) Published By: Oxford University Press https://doi.org/10.2307/1863530 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1863530 Read and download Log in through your school or library Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. To access this article, please contact JSTOR User Support. We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free. Get StartedAlready have an account? Log in Monthly Plan
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Journal Information The American Historical Review (AHR) is the official publication of the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA was founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889 to serve the interests of the entire discipline of history. Aligning with the AHA’s mission, the AHR has been the journal of record for the historical profession in the United States since 1895—the only journal that brings together scholarship from every major field of historical study. The AHR is unparalleled in its efforts to choose articles that are new in content and interpretation and that make a contribution to historical knowledge. The journal also publishes approximately one thousand book reviews per year, surveying and reporting the most important contemporary historical scholarship in the discipline. Publisher Information Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. OUP is the world's largest university press with the widest global presence. It currently publishes more than 6,000 new publications a year, has offices in around fifty countries, and employs more than 5,500 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Sugar processing on the English colony of Antigua, drawing by William Clark, 1823, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. From African Atlantic islands, sugar plantations quickly spread to tropical Caribbean islands with European expansion into the New World. European maritime expansion across the Atlantic Ocean first began with Norse voyages to Iceland and Greenland in the ninth and tenth centuries. But the first European establishment of long distance maritime trade and settlement in the Atlantic World began in the fourteenth century, when explorers from Mediterranean and Atlantic European countries began trading with islanders off the western coast of Africa (such as the Canary, Cape Verde, Madeira, and Azores islands). Eventually western European entrepreneurs and settlers followed Atlantic explorers to these islands to establish early sugar plantations and trading outposts. As sugar plantations grew to require significant numbers of workers and strenuous levels of labor, Europeans enslaved islanders or imported enslaved Africans acquired through trade with the nearby West and Central African coast. In this way, African Atlantic islands became home to some of the earliest examples of the plantation agricultural complex and enslaved African labor system that would come to dominate the Atlantic World. These plantations developed from Mediterranean farming systems that focused on growing cash crops for trade rather than on subsistence crops for local use. Europeans first encountered many of their major cash crops, such as sugar, through exposure to Muslim agriculture during the Crusades (from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries). Sugarcane particularly appealed to Europeans because their only sweetener before that time had been honey. They could also use sugar to make alcoholic beverages, such as rum or Madeira. But growing sugarcane required access to tropical lands not found in northern Europe, and processing and transporting sugar throughout Europe required significant labor and trading resources. Sugar also did not have the nutritional value to be a staple crop for local consumers, like wheat or rice. Instead it was a supplemental, luxury good that had to be grown for a widespread consumer base to become a profitable cash crop. This launched a demand for long-distance trade networks, as well as significant labor and land resources. For these reasons, the expanding European sugar market particularly fueled the rise of plantation-style agriculture, cash crop trading, and plantation slavery throughout the Atlantic World.
 Loading sugar and molasses for shipping to England from Barbados, ca. 18th century, courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. Sugar required extensive maritime trade networks to become a lucrative cash crop. When Europeans settled areas in the Americas where sugarcane could not grow, or when they had to adjust to a competitive sugar market, they found that they could adapt the plantation model and coerced labor structure to capitalize on other cash crops that also had a large consumer market appeal, such as tobacco, indigo, rice, and eventually cotton. Considering the close proximity of Africa, why did Europeans not colonize and establish plantations on the nearby West and Central African mainland, rather than spending valuable resources to cross the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas? Ultimately most Central and Western African nations and empires were militarily too strong for extensive European occupation. Leaders of these African regions often proved willing to trade goods and enslaved Africans, and they even established military alliances with Europeans in outpost settlements, but they resisted and generally prevented widespread European colonization during the early stages of New World expansion. In addition, Europeans lacked immunities to many tropical diseases, which encouraged them to settle on islands or the coast rather than in the African interior. The strength of the Ottoman Empire blocked European expansion east of the Mediterranean, which also forced Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to look west for commercial growth and colonization. Driven by profit-seeking, labor intensive ventures such as plantations and mines, Europeans transformed the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into highways for transporting goods, settlers, and coerced laborers. Plantation agriculture and cash crop trading played a central role in fueling European expansion into the New World, and in developing chattel slavery, primarily of Africans, in the Americas. Which of the following factors led to China's economic expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries?Terms in this set (46) China's economic expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries resulted from: internal improvements and economic growth.
What percent of the Amerindian population was killed by Afro Eurasian diseases during the 16th century?When the Europeans arrived, carrying germs which thrived in dense, semi-urban populations, the indigenous people of the Americas were effectively doomed. They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.
Why was China's demand for silver so high during the 16th and 17th centuries?Global trade
However, the Chinese had a voracious appetite for silver. During the latter part of the 16th century, during the Ming dynasty, Beijing ruled that taxes should be paid in silver, and without domestic recourse to the precious metal, the demand for imported silver soared.
How did the European presence in Africa expand?During this time, many European countries expanded their empires by aggressively establishing colonies in Africa so that they could exploit and export Africa's resources. Raw materials like rubber, timber, diamonds, and gold were found in Africa. Europeans also wanted to protect trade routes.
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