Question

“From the viewpoint of African and European traders, the men, women, and children who were captured, forcibly marched to the coast, and transported across the Atlantic in the crowded bellies of slave ships were primarily objects of exchange. Their humanity—their need for food, water, and rest, or their vulnerability to illness, their despair, or their yearning to run away or rebel—presented an inconvenience and a threat to profits. Of course, the slave dealers recognized, as well, their prisoners’ humanity, for it was the New World demand for slaves’ human labor power that drove the entire enterprise….

Enslaved Africans held onto their humanity not only in their endurance and resistance during the Middle Passage. When they disembarked in the Americas, they brought with them the elements that had made them members of various communities in Africa…. In spite of the violence and alienation of slavery in the New World, and in spite of the necessity of adapting to Africans of other backgrounds and the European-descended master class, enslaved Africans did not quickly abandon the ways of their homelands.”

Lisa A. Lindsay, U.S. historian, Captives as Commodities: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 2008



*The system that Lindsay is describing in the first paragraph is most closely associated with


Group of answer choices

the m’ita system

indentured servitude

the encomienda system

chattel slavery

Answer 1

chattel slavery

Reason: Lindsay describes people treated as commodities—bought, sold, and owned for life to supply labor in the New World. That permanent, property-based system matches chattel slavery (unlike temporary indenture, the mita, or the encomienda).