![[Pasted image 20250207055814.png]] English colonists had not come from a society that included slavery and had initially preferred to use indentured servant labor, since there were a lot of poor English people. And although Africans had long practiced slavery among their own people, it had not been based on race. Africans enslaved other Africans as war captives, for crimes, and to settle debts; they generally used their slaves for domestic and small-scale agricultural work, not for growing cash crops on large plantations. And they never worked people to death. African slavery was often a temporary condition rather than a lifelong sentence, and, unlike New World slavery, it was not passed from a slave mother to her children. African societies usually incorporated the enslaved people into the families they worked for, and by the end of a generation or two the children or grandchildren of the enslaved workers were often full-fledged family members. The growing slave trade with Europeans had a profound impact on the people of West Africa, bringing prominence and power to local chiefs and merchants who traded slaves for European textiles, alcohol, guns, tobacco, and money. Many African rulers also profited by charging Europeans for the right to trade in slaves and imposed taxes on slave purchases. Powerful African kingdoms even staged large-scale raids on each other or on their weaker neighbors to meet the demand for slaves. Once sold to traders, nearly all the captives were sent on the “[[Middle Passage]]”, a transatlantic crossing that typically took two months. By 1625, more than 325,800 Africans had been shipped to the New World, though many thousands more had died of illness or despair during the voyage. Four million enslaved Africans were transported to the [[Caribbean]] between 1501 and 1830. When they reached their destinations in the Americas, Africans found themselves trapped in shockingly brutal slave societies. In the Spanish, French, and English Caribbean, they were typically worked to death in about three years on sugar plantations. In the [[Chesapeake]] colonies, they faced a longer lifetime of harvesting and processing tobacco. Everywhere, Africans resisted slavery, and running away was common. In [[Jamaica]] and other colonies, runaway slaves created [[Maroon|maroon]] communities in remote regions, groups that resisted recapture and eked out a living from the land. Many joined natives who had also fled European control and some formed communities that have lasted into the modern era. --- Next: [[4.5 Carolina]] Back: [[4.3 Racialized Slavery]]