Africa, in general, was a willing participant in the Atlantic Slave Trade with some African groups enslaving and selling others to the European traders. Considering this, what also makes “Source 4: Savages” significant?
Answers
Answer:This order of magnitude required a system for ensuring the capture and supply of slaves which was another feature setting the African slave trade apart. Through most of history, slaves were a traditional by-product of wars - a convenient source of revenues but not the main motive for starting an armed conflict in the first place. This changed in Africa, where wars were increasingly fought with the sole objective of obtaining slaves and thus became more common. Most of the damage was probably inflicted by smaller operations, slave raids and kidnappings, which multiplied as slavery evolved into a central feature of many African societies. At a time when the risk of being enslaved disappeared or was greatly reduced in most parts of the world, Africa evolved into a society where enslavement was pervasive. In the words of Martin Klein, ‘slave trading and slave production became the most important economic activities for many African states’. Just as the magnitude of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is without precedent in history, it is also remarkable that during the early modern period the origin of both slaves and slave buyers became increasingly homogenous. Africans constituted the overwhelming majority of the world’s slaves, and at the height of the trade about 9 out of 10 slaves coming out of Africa were bought by western Europeans. Although slaves were exported towards Muslim lands since the Middle Ages, this trade remained relatively constant and represented between 5 and 10,000 persons exported per year.