By Tales Pinto
One of the main characteristics of the trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean, during the modern period, focused on the exchange of slave workers Africans with European colonies in the Americas. The modern slavery was based on the exchange of these workers for goods produced in the colonies and represented an important source of profit and capital accumulation for European capitalists, in addition to creating the conditions for the development of the capitalist world market .
Modern slavery was, in some ways, different from that practiced in antiquity (Greece, Rome and Egypt, for example), which was directly based on the apprehension of population contingents imprisoned as a result of wars and/or debts between people.
The African slave trade formed the basis of trade in the Atlantic Ocean and aided in the formation of the world market
The adoption of the slave workforce has profoundly marked societies in terms of cultural, economic and social aspects. This was the case in Brazil and the USA, for example, where a large portion of their populations was formed by people of African origin, whose ancestors were displaced to territories in America and marked their presence in music, cuisine, etc.
P>Considering that without workers there is no production, the slave trade was an essential component in the use of the Atlantic Ocean to build a world trade network. Dependent on this labor for agricultural production and mineral extraction in the American colonies, European investors used a triangular trade between the African, European and American continents, draining colonial production and supplying labor to the locations that needed it. To keep these exchanges constant, ports, cities and navigation routes were built that are used for international trade to this day. In addition, it generated high profits for traders, guaranteeing industrial investments that were fundamental for the development of the capitalist mode of production.
However, the use of this type of workforce differed from other forms of labor use, as it was not based on kinship relations, it was not linked to the domestic environment family (as in the case of medieval serfdom) and it was not even based on individual hiring for a salary. This difference in relation to wage labor was of paramount importance for efforts to extinguish its use, mainly due to pressure from England.
The main industrialized country of the 19th century, England needed to expand the consumer market for its products. However, the maintenance of large contingents of workers who were not salaried workers impeded this growth. This was the main reason for the various attempts to ban the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean, which ended up taking place in the second half of the 19th century. Despite its end, the slave labor trade from Africa guaranteed the consolidation of an important trade route used until today and which was of paramount importance for the construction of the capitalist world market.