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Aug 8, 1444
Atlantic Slave Trade
Captured Africans were sold to European slave traders on the West African coast.
“Middle Passage” – Millions of Africans were taken in ship
Treatment – enslaved Africans were auctioned and forced to work under brutal conditions. -
Aug 8, 1444
The scope of the Slave trade
The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, North & South America is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans
About 600,000 African slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa.
Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. -
Jan 1, 1513
Religious immigration
Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World English and Dutch colonies, tended to be more religiously diverse. -
Feb 10, 1537
The Slavery Question
In 1537, the papacy definitively recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement, without putting an end to the debate.
Later, the Valladolid debate between the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas and another Dominican philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, each took opposing positions to justify enslavement and nothing was resolved. -
Jan 1, 1558
Disease and Indigenous Population Loss
The large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas.
Epidemics swept the Americas subsequent to European contact, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas :
smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589,
typhus (1546),
influenza (1558),
diphtheria (1614)
and measles (1618) -
The Search for Riches
*The first Englishmen to settle permanently in America hoped for some of the same rich discoveries when they established their first permanent settlement in Jamestown, VA in 1607.
* Were sponsored by common stock companies such as the chartered Virginia Company -
Indentured Servants
1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies
17th century, indentured servants constituted 75% of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake region.
Many of the migrants from -
Virginia Colonies
*searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter and the biblical principle that "he who will not work shall not eat.“
*The extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. Tobacco later became a cash crop -
Migration to North America
Charles I, King of England and Scotland, persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642 -
Forced immigration and Enslavement
Slavery existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans
Some of these captives were even forced to undergo human sacrifice in certain Amerindian civilizations, such as the Aztecs.
As the native populations declined from European diseases, forced exploitation, atrocities, they were often replaced by Africans
