This page presents information related to the eighth class session of J. B. Owens's fall 2002 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 360/560, The Spanish Empire. This course is part of the core curriculum in comparative and world history of the Department of History, Idaho State University. The sole purpose of this page is to provide an orientation to the reading assignments and class session for those students enrolled in History 360/560. See the source page for the complete Dublin Core standard metadata.

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Slavery in Africa, Atlantic networks, and working American resources

Coerced African labor and its great forced migration in the Atlantic world. The increasing integration of the Americas into the developing global economic system. Special attention will be given to the establishment of networks of major administrative, commercial, and production centers from Manila to Northwest Europe and Southwest Africa and to the development of the "plantation complex" as the focus of agricultural production, machine technology, labor migration, capital investment, and long-distance commerce.

Reading: Thornton, chs. 3 and 4; Burkholder and Johnson, ch. 4; Thornton, ch. 5.

  1. What are the major problems of fact and interpretation that underlie the current scholarly debate over the nature of slavery in Africa and the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the African regions that participated?
  2. Why was slavery widespread in Africa even before the development of the Atlantic slave trade?
  3. Why was personal property in land rare in West Africa?
  4. Why were the institutions through which people claimed the products of human production different in Africa and Europe?
  5. In what ways did an organizational dependency on kinship lead to the elaboration in Africa of politically and economically inegalitarian human collectivities?
  6. Why was there a close connection between ancestral and territorial deities in much of Africa?
  7. Why was it thought, in both Africa and Europe, that conquerors had the right to enslave the conquered?
  8. What assumptions are suggested about government autonomy and capacity when African collectivities are described as "states"?
  9. In the West African political context, what made a particular leader "strong"? What made him or her "weak"?
  10. Why was kinship the normal means in West Africa to express relations of dependency?
  11. Why were slaves employed by Africans for a wider range of purposes than was the case with Western European use of slave labor?
  12. Why were European traders so quickly able to gain participation in the ongoing West African slave trade?
  13. Why didn't the "western way of war" permit Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to use military intimidation to control the supply of slaves from West and West Central Africa?
  14. What factors led to warfare in Western Africa?
  15. Why were the Portuguese drawn into wars in Angola between 1579 and 1655?
  16. Why were there such enormous variations in the size of African political units in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
  17. Why did some African areas, like Benin and Kongo, at times cease to participate in the Atlantic slave trade?
  18. Why did the export of African slaves expand so rapidly after 1650? Why did Allada become the center of this expansion?
  19. Why were European soldiers willing to serve as mercenary troops for African rulers?
  20. What role did warfare and political instability have on the availability of slaves?
  21. In what ways did the exchange of plants, animals, and peoples between the Americas and Afroeurasia in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries affect the social and cultural environments of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and American Indians?
  22. Why did an active silver trade develop between Mexico and Manila?
  23. Why did chattel slavery become so much more important in the Americas than it was in Europe, despite the institution's importance in the ancient Mediterranean world and in the Ottoman empire?
  24. Why did sustained growth of the American Indian population begin only in the mid seventeenth century?
  25. What impact did pre-conquest American social and cultural environments have on the ability of Castilian and Portuguese conquerors to benefit from Western Hemisphere resources?
  26. Why did so few Europeans go to the Americas before 1800?
  27. What opportunities did American Indian peoples in Castilian and Portuguese controlled territories have to design their own social and cultural environments?
  28. What made the Castilian encomienda a desirable institution for Europeans in the Americas?
  29. Besides the encomienda, what other means were found to control the labor of indigenous peoples in Castilian America?
  30. Why did so many Africans go to the Americas before 1800?
  31. Why were slave masters so often little concerned about slave living conditions on sugar plantations?
  32. In what ways did the emerging Atlantic commercial economy transform agricultural production, manufacturing, and the uses of labor in Europe and the Americas?
  33. Why did slavery become the labor system for the production of American sugar?
  34. What factors made possible the Atlantic slave trade?
  35. What contributions did Africans make to the development of the Atlantic world?
  36. Why were Africans able to play such an important role in the making of the Atlantic world?
  37. Why did the Castilian and Portuguese governments permit systems of coerced labor to develop in their American territories?
  38. Why was slave labor popular with mine and plantation operators?

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J. B. Owens
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Revised: 31 August 2002




URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/readver5.08.html