AP African American Studies: Unit Two: Freedom Enslavement and Resistence

This special issue questions how global slaved-based economic activities and
their spinoffs have contributed to economic development throughout
Europe. The question of the impact of slavery has gained new importance in
debates on the history of economic development, capitalism and inequality.

This article traces the long-run contribution of the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas to the rise of the capitalist global economy. It demonstrates the two-stage evolution of the global economy—the rise of the nineteenth-century capitalist Atlantic economic system (the nucleus of the global economy), the first stage, and the extension of that system to Asia and the rest of the world, the second stage. It shows that the establishment of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy was a function of the growth of multilateral trade in the Atlantic basin that resulted from the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, on which basis the major economies of the Americas, especially the US economy, and Western European economies, especially the British economy, achieved structural transformation, which included the British Industrial Revolution and its new technologies. Led by Great Britain, the advanced economies of the
Atlantic world employed the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, economically and politically, to extend the Atlantic capitalist economic order to Asia and the rest of the world to constitute the hierarchically structured capitalist global economic order.

abstract: The economics literature on Atlantic slavery attests to its negative long-run
impact on development outcomes in Africa and the Americas. What was slavery’s
impact on Europe? In this paper, I test the hypothesis that slavery contributed
to modern economic growth in Europe using data on European participation in
the Atlantic slave trade.
The number of slaving voyages is positively associated with European city growth from
1600-1850. A 10% increase in slaving voyages is associated with a 1.2% increase
in port city population.

ABSTRACT
In this period, the Dutch Republic was one of the
most developed commercial societies in Europe. The
import, processing and export of slave-produced goods
such as sugar, coffee and tobacco played an important role in this economy. In 1770, 5.2% of the GDP of the Dutch Republic and 10.36% of the GDP of its richest province Holland was based on Atlantic slavery. In this year, 19% of Dutch imports and (re-) exports consisted of goods produced by the enslaved in the Atlantic. These high percentages were dependent on the prominent role that the Dutch Republic and the province of Holland in
particular played in Atlantic slavery-based commodity
chains. These chains ran from the provisioning of slave
ships in the Dutch Republic, through the slave trade, to the plantations, the transport of tropical products to Europe, their processing in the Dutch Republic, to their final export to the European hinterland. As much as 40% of all the growth of the economy of Holland in the decades around 1770 can be traced back to slavery.

Reviews several historians' arguments on the connection between slavery and capitalism.

Listening Guide for Episode 2