Origins of Slavery and the Asiento System (1500–1700)
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Flip to reveal answersWhy did indigenous labour fail to meet colonial demand?
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Question
Why did indigenous labour fail to meet colonial demand?
Answer
Disease (smallpox, measles) and forced labour under encomienda killed up to 90% of some indigenous populations by 1600.
Question
Why did European indentured servants fail to meet colonial demand?
Answer
They died quickly in tropical climates, cost money to transport, and gained freedom after their contract ended — colonists wanted permanent labour.
Question
Define: asiento
Answer
A Spanish royal contract giving a person, company, or country the exclusive right to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies.
Question
Which power held the asiento first?
Answer
Portugal, using its West African trading forts (like Elmina) to supply enslaved people directly to Spanish America.
Question
How did Britain gain the asiento in 1713?
Answer
The Treaty of Utrecht, ending the War of the Spanish Succession, transferred the asiento to Britain's South Sea Company.
Question
What is the 'triangular trade'?
Answer
European goods shipped to West Africa bought enslaved people; enslaved people shipped to the Americas produced sugar/tobacco; sugar/tobacco shipped to Europe.
Question
How significant was Saint-Domingue's sugar economy by the 1780s?
Answer
It produced around 40% of Europe's sugar and 60% of its coffee using roughly 500,000 enslaved Africans — one colony rivaling national economies.
Question
What did the 1662 Virginia law establish?
Answer
That a child's status (enslaved or free) followed the mother's status, making slavery hereditary and permanent.
Question
Compare: sugar colonies vs. other colonial economies in scale of enslaved labour
Answer
Sugar colonies (Brazil, British/French West Indies) imported the most enslaved Africans and had the highest death rates, because sugar labour was the deadliest and most demanding work.
Question
What social hierarchy did slavery create in colonial societies?
Answer
A race-based hierarchy: enslaved Africans at the bottom, free people of colour in a middle layer (larger in Brazil/French colonies), white colonists on top.
Question
Why was Portugal positioned to supply enslaved Africans before 1492?
Answer
Portuguese traders had already been buying and selling enslaved Africans along the West African coast since the 1440s, decades before Columbus reached the Americas.
Question
What role did racial ideology play in the origins of slavery?
Answer
Europeans built ideas of racial hierarchy to justify enslaving Africans specifically, turning an economic solution into a permanent, race-based system.
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Slavery and the New World (1500–1800)
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