Slave Culture in British and Latin America: A Detailed Comparison

This essay provides a comparative analysis of slave culture in British America and Latin America, focusing on the experiences of African slaves and the transformation of their indigenous culture in the colonies. It contrasts the conditions of slavery, the impact of European culture, and the economic factors driving the slave trade in both regions. The essay explores the differences in plantation economies, the role of sugar and tobacco cultivation, and the varying degrees of cultural assimilation and resistance among slaves. By examining historical sources and scholarly perspectives, the essay offers insights into the complexities of slavery and its lasting impact on the cultural landscape of the Americas. Desklib provides access to similar essays and study tools for students.

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SLAVE CULTURE
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Introduction
British colonization in North America started in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia and the
process of colonization reached its peak when the British Empire established its colony
throughout the America. Slavery was the most important institution in British colonial
America. British rulers captured Africans and brought them to the colonies as slaves
(Northrup, 1994). The Africans who came to the British America brought with them their
African culture, which was later transformed as they were exposed to different cultural
practices (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). On the other hand, slavery in Latin American
lands was practiced in pre-colonial time and it was the common institution among the
indigenous pre-Columbian people of the Americas. Latin America was the colony of the
Spaniards and it was the sole destination in the Atlantic slave trade as huge numbers of
Africans were brought from Africa to the Spanish colonies. Black slaves arrived in Americas
in the early stages of exploration and settlement of the Spaniards (Northrup, 1994). They
have also brought their culture with them and mixing of culture was the prominent part of
their history.
The essay will show a compare and contrast of the slave culture of British America
and United States with slave culture in Latin America. It should be remembered that the
slaves in this regions were the African people mainly and their indigenous culture has been
mixed up with the new culture of the colonies. The essay will investigate the black culture of
the colonies.
Slave Culture of British America and United States
Almost ten million Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands and taken to
the Americas as slaves by the Europeans (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). Most of these
Africans were brought in as workers in the cotton and sugar plantation. When boiled down to

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the root causes of the phenomenon of slavery, it can now be understood that it was not racism
that had propelled the trend, but rather economic causes were the prime reason for slavery to
have flourished in the world.
During the period of 16th to the 19th century, the European colonial masters used to
transport massive amounts of arms and ships to Africa, enslave the native people and then
transport them to the Americas as slaves (Northrup, 1994). As a return for these endeavors,
coffee, sugar and cotton was exported back to Europe. In the northern part of the American
continent, it was mostly the British who had established their dominance, while the other
European colonies had spread across the South America and the Caribbean.
According to Weber, power is the fundamental in any form of social relationship that
enables one person to make another person carry out her or his will even against the wishes
of the latter. This domination has perhaps been epitomized by slavery. The North American
slavery was one of the most degrading things ever to happen and ultimately resulted in the
Civil War, which finally was able to abolish the trend in the United States. The general
mindset of the American people, who were in support of slavery, during that time can be
summed up from the writings of Thomas Ruffin, a North Carolina judge, who said that the
final motive of the whole trend of slavery is to make sure that the European masters are have
public safety and that they must be guaranteed profit from the trade (Goodheart, Brown &
Rabe, 1993). The southern states of the country, the Confederacy, were the places where the
notion of slavery was widely accepted and master-subordinate mentality dominated the daily
lives and views of the people.
The Atlantic slave trade had flourished with the discovery of the New World
and the North America was perhaps the biggest market for the slaves, being more densely
populated by the Europeans than the Latin America (Northrup, 1994). Even though it was the

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British who had started taking the slaves to the Americas, the formation of the United States
did not stop the trend, rather continued on with the same. Despite the popular belief of
tobacco or cotton being the prime reasons for the import of slaves to the United States, it was
actually the sugar plantations that employed more than half the Africans who could survive
the ordeals of the journey across the Atlantic. The United States was not like the other
colonies that used to import slaves. The sugar industry did not play too big a role in the
expansion of slavery in the country. The absence of intensive sugar plantation led slavery to
spread in a different manner than in other countries. As the country never had much to do
with the sugar industry, it was mainly the tobacco cultivation that had instigated the
development of slavery in the United States (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). Chesapeake
had already started to employ African slaves as tobacco plantation workers and by the 1730s,
the number of the slaves in the country rose to about 120,000; as compared to a mere 16,000
in the sugar plantations in Virginia as late as 1780. Only a few slaves were employed as
domestic help even in the late eighteenth century. Slave trade and population was rapidly
growing in the Carolinas and Georgia and most of them were employed in mostly tobacco,
rice and indigo farming. Cotton emerged as a major crop in the nineteenth century and this
was one of major reasons for slavery to flourish in the southern part of the country.
There is countless literature, books, journals, articles, movies and music that have
been inspired by, and tried to portray the traumas of, slavery. One of the most important
features of the slaves in the United States was that they were much closer to the European
culture and further removed from their own culture than the other slaves in the Caribbean
Islands (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). The Northern part of the United States
increasingly started to reject slavery and the fact that most of the US legislative personnel
were from the North, it ended up in the withdrawing of the US from the international slave
trade. The transformation of the Africans into African-Americans and their acceptance into

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the American culture was a long and arduous process and in many places, it is still not
entirely accepted by everyone.
In most parts of the country, the slaves were completely kept away from the world of
the colonial masters. In other parts, they were accepted to a greater degree and even often
treated with more compassion than it was the norm (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993).
Slave Culture in Latin America and Caribbean
By the late eighteenth century, most of the population of Brazil and the Caribbean
were descendants of the people who were brought in from Africa as slaves. Even though the
slavery has been viewed as a merely racial hate propaganda, the basis of even that was
formulated stood upon an economic interest of the European countries.
The conditions of the slaves in the British Caribbean and the French colonies of South
America have been noted down to be more horrific than suffered by the slaves in the United
States. There have been significant studies regarding the slaves of the Latin America. Most of
the studies have shown that almost forty one percent of the slaves that were brought from
Africa, went to the slave owners in Brazil and the Caribbean colonies owned by Britain and
France. However, it must be noted that in many cases, the slave owners were less bothered
about the ethnic origins of the slaves. There are a number of documented records where the
plantation owners have been seen to replace the African slaves with poor white people that
were sent to the West Indies as slaves. Long before the African people were enslaved by the
Europeans, the colonies have always tried to subdue any population that they viewed as weak
or economically poorer. This was one of the major reasons for the European empires to use
the African labors as they saw fit, and this process was facilitated because of the possession
of firearms and other advanced armaments of the Europeans (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe,
1993).

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Colombia was one of the major destinations of the slaves in South America. The
slaves were used by the colonial masters in many different ways and they were expected to
work without any single privilege in return for all their physical labor. A huge number of
slaves were employed in the mining fields of Bolivia and the digging if the Panama Canal. It
must be remembered that the European masters saw the African slaves as barbarians and
heathens who they sought to salvage. Hence, there was always an underlying current of
religious expansion under slavery, which also prompted them to round up as many people as
they could. Brazil had the largest slave population in the world and most of the slaves were
owned by the Portuguese. Most of the Portuguese people owned large lands and mining fields
which needed a lot of slaves to work in, and the Portuguese pirate ships around the coasts of
the Sub-Saharan Africa often helped the empire to kidnap hundreds of people to be sent to
South America. Slavery quickly became the central source of economy for the Portuguese
colonial economy. Sugar plantations were the main reason that slavery was instigated in the
Caribbean islands. According to estimates, almost thirty five percent of the slaves that were
shipped from Africa were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean islands (Goodheart, Brown &
Rabe, 1993). The Portuguese did not stop with only the Africans, and wished to enslave the
native American people as well. However, this plan failed. Despite thus, it must be
remembered that the European colonial powers were reasons behind the extinction of some of
the oldest civilizations in the world, that existed in countries like Peru. A number of reasons
affected the native Americans and resulted in the demise of thousands of them. In this
situation the European masters decided that it is much more economical to simply employ the
captured Africans as slaves. Even though slavery was abolished in many European countries
during the eighteenth century, the colonies kept the practice alive and the slaves were always
treated with the utmost contempt imaginable.

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Sugar and tobacco plantations were the most important crops in the Latin America
and the Caribbean, which became the reason for the enslavement of a huge number of
Africans, making them face terrible atrocities and a life of pain and suffering (Goodheart,
Brown & Rabe, 1993).
Compare and Contrast
West Indian historian Eric Williams has commented that following the Spanish
practice of slave capture of the Indians, England and France also started to enslave the
Indians to their colonies. Even the first instances of the slave trade involved the Indians from
the Latin American lands, not the Africans (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). There is
difference between the reciprocation of culture of a Native Indian slave than African slave.
The Native Indian were accustomed with a life style, which was free and liberal. However,
when they were brought to the slave plantation of the new worlds, they had lost their
collective spirit of the communal life. Eric Williams has picked up Fernando Ortiz’s
comment to illustrate the condition of the Indian slave and the overall effect of enslavement
on their cultural life. Fernando Ortiz commented, “To subject the Indians to the mines, to
their monotonous, insane and severe labor, without tribal sense, without religious ritual,…
was like taking away from him the meaning of his life…it was to enslave not only his
muscles but also his collective spirit”(Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993).
In most cases, the Indians were unable to adjust to a completely new form of life as a
slave and they were rapidly yielded to the massive labor that were demanded from their
master, the inadequate diet and completely new types of diseases of the White man.
Therefore, it is no doubt that the slaves in the British Caribbean Islands and the
French colonies of South America had suffered more than the slaves in the United States are.

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The enslavement process was continued with the Africans at the Latin American lands
apart from the enslavement of the Native Americans. Almost thirty-five percent slaves were
Africans of the total population in Brazil and the Caribbean islands nearly around seventeenth
century (Klein & Vinson, 2007). However, the African slaves were much cheaper compared
to slaves from the Latin America or Caribbean. Eric Williams has mentioned that as the
African slaves were least cheap than slaves from any other lands, economic control from part
of the Europeans was the main concern for raising the system of slavery, which resulted in
racism. It was economy, not racism, which was the primary cause of the slave plantation in
British Americas and Latin Americas or Caribbean land. The common economic factors for
these lands were mostly cotton, sugar plantation or tobacco. The African were captured for
slave trade and they were brought to these lands, as they were the cheapest labor for heavy
work in the cotton and sugar plantation. There is a controversy about the reason why the
slaves were brought to the new land. Mostly it is believed that African slaves were brought to
the new land for providing labor in the sugar industry (Northrup, 1994). However, it was
mainly the tobacco cultivation that had helped to flourish the culture of slavery as a ruthless
institution in the United State of the British Colony (Goodheart, Brown & Rabe, 1993). On
the other hand, in the land of the Latin America and Caribbean, the reason for the
enslavement of the African people was demand in huge labor in sugar and tobacco plantation
of Latin America and Caribbean as these were the most demanding crops of these lands.
However, the reason for developing the slave culture in the land of the British Americas and
Latin America or Caribbean was partly common, which is enslavement for the tobacco
plantation.
The North America was the biggest market place for slave trade in the British
colonies in Americas. However, the other colonies of the Europeans like Latin American land
or Caribbean land was the not so big market of the slaves. Accordingly, the slave culture

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could not get chance to develop that much in the lands of the Latin America as compared to
Americas (Northrup, 1994).
Conclusion
It can be concluded by stating that slavery was most cruel practice in the time after the
exploration of the New World or even during the exploration process of the New World. The
Europeans enslaved African people to work in their colonial lands. These African slaves were
cheapest and Europeans bought them for working in the plantation of sugar or tobacco. The
slave culture was the most barbaric practice that was initiated most and in massive form by
the rise of the British colonial power. The fundamental difference between the slave culture
of the British Americas and Latin America or Caribbean is that the slave was massive in the
British Americas than the other two lands. There is countless literature, books, journals,
articles, movies and music that have been inspired by, and tried to portray the traumas of,
slavery. One of the most important features of the slaves in the United States was that they
were much closer to the European culture and further removed from their own culture than
the other slaves in the Caribbean Islands. Thus, this essay has also been discussed a lot about
the slave culture in the United States or British colony of the Americas with slave culture in
Latin America and Caribbean. This essay has also shown the compare and contrast of the
British slavery in the Americas and United States with Latin America and Caribbean.

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References
Goodheart, L. B., Brown, R. D., & Rabe, S. G. (Eds.). (1993). Slavery in American society.
Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Klein, H. S., & Vinson III, B. (2007). African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Oxford University Press.
Northrup, D. (1994). The Atlantic Slave Trade, 3rd Edition, (Problems in World History).
Retrieved 8 December 2017.