Europe's Expansion
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Welcome to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Level 1, Lesson 3: Europe’s Expansion
In this lesson, you will learn about:
The money made from slavery
The benefits of slavery to the white working class
The Industrial Revolution
The link between slavery and the banks of today
The colonisation and genocide of Australasia
Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will understand:
Which cities benefited most from slavery
How white working class people benefited from slavery
How white indentured servants benefited from slavery
Which banks started off as slave owners
The money made from the Slave Trade caused Europe’s economy to blossom.
Millions of Africans for hundreds of years received no pay for their labour, enabling Europeans to accumulate all profits for themselves. Plantation owners collectively made billions from both the sale of slave-grown produce and the inter-island sale of slaves. Back in Europe entire industries were developed off the back of enslaving Africans, such as shipbuilding and industrial factory work. This increased the wealth within many cities; Liverpool, Manchester, London, Nantes, Nice, Lisbon, and Barcelona owe a great deal of their wealth to African slavery. The working classes of Europe also benefited, as jobs were created and wages were increased due to the slave labour back in the Americas. Many working-class families also directly had shares in plantations or the slave shipping industry, as not just the upper classes acquired wealth from slavery.
The Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without slavery, as the wealth needed for the engineering and scientific advancements all came from plantations among the colonies. The USA, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Brazil benefited as much as Europe from slavery, as white people who were originally indentured servants were given land and tools to build their own wealth off the backs of Black people.
Banking and trading giants such as Barclays, Brown Brothers Harriman and Lloyd’s of London started off as plantation owners and slave ship insurers. These insurers would protect slave traders from losses of their “cargo” as Black people were seen as property rather than as humans.
It’s impossible to correctly quantify how much money was made from African slavery because the collective profits were so large, as were the losses of life. Centuries of slavery led to Europeans and their American and Australian descendants dominating the world. The empires of Europe controlled much of the global economy as white people implemented the culture of white supremacy across the planet. The British invaded and colonised Australasia, once again enacting genocide on the indigenous populations. Europe also colonised large parts of Asia. However, Black resistance was present throughout European barbarism as the enslaved refused to lie down and accept their situation.