One of the major debates among historians concerning the Atlantic Slave Trade focuses on the issue of why Europeans enslaved Africans between the mid 1500’s to the early 19th century. Was the motive for Europeans purely economic as historian Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery or was the motive based more on cultural or ideological reasons (racism)? In the 1950s and 1960s, historians Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan both supported the contention that racism, and not economics, was at the root cause of the slave trade. More recently, in The Rise of African Slavery in America (2000), David Eltis posited that Europeans did not enslave other Europeans (that would have been cheaper and easier) because of an underlying commitment to individual rights. He further argues that Africans were seen as sufficiently different; they were the ‘Other—both physically and culturally—and thus their enslavement could be rationalized. Simply put, was European motivation for the slave trade more about profits or racism? Or is there some other explanation? Make sure you have a thesis (a general argument) and provide examples and details from your sources to support your answer (please refer to the rubric on Canvas).
Welcome to Legit Writing
