In the book 1493, Charles C. Mann argues the Atlantic Slave trade was operated by Africans who sold other Africans as slaves to Europeans for profit. The Africans were not “helpless pawns” (427) in a scheme created by the Europeans to subject a whole race of people to laborious work nor were they forced to sell other Africans. To Africans, slaves were seen as the most valuable property one could own much like how to Europeans “the most important form of property was land” (428). In Africa, land was very hard to sell and buy as most of it belonged to the king or the government. Therefore the power and wealth was measure date amount slaves one had in their possession. Slaves were seen as “adornments to the owner” (429) and as valuable as “diamond necklaces” (429). The sources to obtain slaves…show more content… Mann very clearly stated this sequence of events that starts with African merchants buying “slaves from African armies, raiders,and pirates”(431) and paying “Africans to convey them to African run-holding tanks” (431). However Mann does acknowledge how the nature of slavery was altered negatively with the involvement of Europeans. Slaves were not used more harsh, manual labor in Africa as they were on sugar and tobacco plantations. They were treated more as public servants who built roads, fences, and barns. This change in the use of slaves contribute dot them becoming “anonymous units of labor”(432) or “production inputs on a balance sheet” (432). Shipping slaves to an a different continent and to completely unknown owners stripped away the identity of slaves. Many times the slaveowners did not even see their slaves or as Mann puts it, their “human property”(432). The owners in America did not know the “familial, lineage, or tribal obligation that resulted in their enslavement” (432). Instead they were all just corpses that the owners surveyed to pick out those with the desirable physical
