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Chapter 14 Part II




Chapter 14: Economic Transportation 



“The World Hunt”: Fur in Global Commerce 
  • In the early modern era first joined silver textiles and spices as major items of global commerce. Their production had an important environmental impact as well as serious implications for the human societies that generated and consumed them 
  • By the 1500 European population growth and agricultural expansion have sharply diminished the supply of fur-bearing animals such as beaver, rabbits, sable, marten, and deer
  • Much of the early modern era witnessed a period of cooling temperatures and harsh winters, known as the Little Ice Age. 
  • The cost of a good-quality beaver pelt quadrupled in France between 1558 and 1611.  The price increase translated into strong economic incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animals found in North America. At the same time, the collapse of Native American populations in North America caused by the Great Dying led to the regrowth of forest habitats for fur-bearing animals and deer herds. 
  • Only a few Europeans directly engaged in commercial trapping or hunting. They usually waited for Indians to bring the furs or skins initially to their coastal settlements and later to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America. 
  • Native Americans represented a cheap labor force in this international commercial effort, but they were not directly coerced labor force. 
  • In the 1630s and 1640s, about half of the Hurons perished from influenza, smallpox, and other European-borne diseases. The fur trade generated warfare beyond anything previously known. 
  • The fur trade wasn’t the only thing that decimated Native American societies. Disease, dependence, guns, alcohol, and the growing encroachment of European colonial empires
  • With the fur trade in full swing, women spent more time processing those furs for sale than in producing household items, some of which were now available for purchase from Europeans. 
  • Women generated and controlled the trade in wild rice and maple syrup, both essential to the livelihood of European traders. 


Commerce in People: The Atlantic Slave Trade 
  • Between 1500 and 1866, the Atlantic Slave Trade took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves. 
  • Within Africa itself, that commerce thoroughly disrupted some societies, strengthened others, and corrupted many. 
  • The profits from the slave trade and the forced labor of African slaves certainly enriched European and Euro-American societies, even as the practice of slavery contributed much to racial stereotypes of European peoples. 


Slave Trade in Context 

  • The Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas represented the most recent large-scale expression of a very widespread human practice, the owning and exchange of human beings

  • Before 1500, the Mediterranian and Indian Ocean basins were the major areas of the Old World slave trade, and southern Russia was a major source of slaves

  • Although slaves were everywhere vulnerable “outsiders” to their masters’ societies, in many places they could be integrated into their owners’ households, lineages, or communities 

  • In some places, children inherited the slave status their parents elsewhere those children were free persons. 

  • The slavery that emerged in the Americas was distinctive in several ways. One was simply the immense size of the traffic in slaves and its centrality to the economies of colonial America. The New World slavery was largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking any rights in the society of their owners.


The Slave Trade in Practice


  • The European demand for slaves was clearly the chief cause of this tragic commerce and from the point of sale on the African coast to the massive use of slave labor on American plantations, the entire enterprise was in European hands


  • Europeans died like flies when they entered the interior because they lacked immunities to common tropical diseases


  • Over the four centuries of the slave trade, millions of Africans underwent such experiences, but their numbers varied considerably over time

The Impact of the Slave Trade in Africa


  • Although the slave trade did not cause Africa to experience the kind of population collapse that occurred in the Americas, it certainly slowed Africa’s growth at a time where Europe, China, and other regions were expanding demographically 


  • Economically, the slave trade stimulated little positive change in Africa because those Africans who benefited most from the traffic in people were not investing in the productive capacities of their societies 


  • Socially, the slave trade shaped African societies. It surely fostered moral corruption, particularly as judicial proceedings were manipulated to generate victims for the slave trade

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