Chapter 14 (second half)

The second half of this Chapter begins with the role of fur in global commerce. In the early modern era, furs joined silver, textiles, and spices as major items of global commerce. Their production had an important impact  for the human societies that generated and consumed them. By 1500, European population and agricultural growth had sharply diminished the supply of fur-bearing animals. Furthermore,  much of the early modern era witnessed a period of cooling temperatures and harsh winters, known as the little ice age, which heavily increased the demand for furs. With people having no choice but to buy fur for the cold winters, the cost of good fur pelt quadrupled in France. This translated into strong economic  incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animals in North America, which was easier because of the regrowth of forest habits for fur-bearing animals following the great dying. This chapter then goes into commerce in people, referring to the Atlantic Slave Trade. This trade in human beings from Africa took an estimated 12.5 million people, shipped them across the Atlantic in the middle passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often short lives as slaves. About 1.8 million of enslaved Africans died during the transatlantic crossing, while countless others died in the process of capture and transport. The profits from the slave trade and the forced labor of African slaves certainly enriched European and Euro-American societies, even as the practice contributed much to the racial stereotypes of European people. The slavery that emerged in the Americas was distinctive in several ways. The immense size of the traffic in slaves and its centrality to the economies of colonial America. This New World slavery was largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking any rights and viewed on the same level as animals. In Africa, they had to defend from European intrusion, though some African societies gave up slaves willingly. eventually Europeans started to die because they lacked immunities to tropical diseases. The main outcome of the slave trade lay in the new linkages that it generated as Africa became a permanent part of an interacting Atlantic world.