Asked by nick

“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



2. Which of the following changes in period 1450-1750 most directly led to the establishment of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Group of answer choices

European colonization of the Americas and the subsequent growth of the plantation economy

the dehumanization of Africans during the Middle Passage journey

the Spanish discovery of silver in Potosí

the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
European colonization of the Americas and the subsequent growth of the plantation economy.

Explanation: Colonization created large-scale labor‑intensive plantations (sugar, tobacco, later cotton) with huge labor demands that indigenous populations and indentured Europeans could not meet, driving Europeans to import enslaved Africans and thus establish the trans‑Atlantic slave trade. The other options are consequences or unrelated causes.