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



4. A comparison of Spanish, Portuguese and British American colonies reveals which of the following?

Group of answer choices

The British utilized chattel slavery while the Spanish and Portuguese relied solely on the encomienda system to extract natural resources

Slaves in Spanish and Portuguese America were more likely to embrace Catholicism when compared with Protestant conversion in British North America

Maroon societies occurred only in Spanish and Portuguese America

All European American colonial economies depended on a range of coerced labor

Answer 1

All European American colonial economies depended on a range of coerced labor.

Explanation: Spanish, Portuguese, British (and other) colonies all used multiple forms of coerced labor — indigenous labor systems (encomienda, repartimiento, mita), African chattel slavery, indentured servitude, encomienda/peonage/hacienda labor, and other coerced or semi‑coerced arrangements — to extract wealth. The other choices are inaccurate generalizations (Spanish/Portuguese did not rely solely on encomienda; maroon communities existed in British colonies too; religious conversion patterns were complex and varied).