Atlantic Slave Changes

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While the notion of who was a slave did not change as much, the treatment and process of buying and trading, and the transportation of slaves changed as the notion of what a slave was changed during the 17th and 18th centuries during the Atlantic slave trade. The first change in the slave trade was when the Europeans started to cram hundreds of slaves into ships that transported slaves from the coasts of Africa to the plantations in the Americas. Slaves would spend months crammed together in the hull of a ship, lying in their own excrement. In an account by Olaudah Equiano, when he entered the slave ship he, “received such a salutation in [his] nostrils as [he] had never experienced in [his] life… [Equiano] became so sick and low that [he] …show more content…
During their voyage to the Americas, many slaves were unfortunate enough to die onboard their slave ships, but those who were not as unfortunate would mostly die when they started their work on the plantations. When slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas in the crammed slave ships, some would not survive. In Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, he recalls that during his time in the slave ship that transported him, “a sickness among the slaves, of which many died” (Equiano). The notion of slavery changed a lot, and slaves were treated as people, and they were not neglected and left to die. They were treated with little to no respect, as if they were not human, and left to die. This notion that slaves were not human was very similar to the early notions of slavery, and might as well have come from the 14th-century scholar Ibn Khaldun that, “Negroes have little that is essentially human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals” (Strayer 480). This idea that Africans and people of color were inferior was the main contributor to why Africans were targeted as the main source of slave labor. While slavery was not limited to only Africans, they were the dominant population in slavery for the Europeans. Muslims were drawn to Africa for their main source of slaves, and their idea that people of color were inferior was passed onto their European neighbors who also adopted the same mindset. This idea might have also led to the change in the idea of slavery because Europeans slave owners started seeking out people of color to be their main source of
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