Justene Hill Edwards

And so, again, we see the Dutch in Brazil.

We see the Portuguese in Brazil as well.

We see all of these kind of colonial enterprises crop up around the production and exportation of crops.

But there were specific crops that were kind of honed on early on.

Sugar.

becomes a massively important product that really fuels economic activity and travel and trade throughout the Atlantic world.

And so in many ways, sugar and slavery go hand in hand.

One would not have burgeoned and grew without the other.

Sure.

Well, first, I mean, I do want to kind of reframe this.

I tend to not call slave labor free labor because I think that that terminology could be a bit fraught and a bit confusing.

You're right.

Yeah.

But the transition of slave traders kind of taking a person and taking a person and making them into a commodity, into a slave is such an important part of this conversation in that in many ways, slavery,

kind of the violence of slavery and the violence of the slave trade was kind of the catalyst that kind of turned a person into a commodity, into a slave.

And that process was through the Middle Passage, kind of taking a person either captured in war or kidnapped, holding them in a slave port, in a slave pen, in a port along the Atlantic African coast,

And a European trader would then buy them and warehouse them or imprison them on slave ships.

And this is where the kind of technology comes in.

Increasingly, again, beginning in the 15th century, but kind of going on to even the 16th and 17th, we see Europeans start to invest in kind of figuring out how to make slave trading vessels more quote-unquote efficient.

And so they were kind of strategizing about how they could manufacture slave trading ships and boats to warehouse as many enslaved Africans as possible to hopefully, for their part, ensure that the fewest amount died on the transatlantic passage.