Comparative Aspects Of Slavery In Brazil

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The Comparative Aspects of Slavery in the United States and Brazil

The United States (U.S) and Brazil are two Western cultures that both went through a period in the 19th century where Africans worked as slaves. In the Southern U.S., slavery was high in the mid-1800s, but it was not abolished until the end of American Civil War in 1865 when the House passed the 13th Amendment. Like the U.S., Portuguese settlers also employed slaves, but slavery was not abolished until the late-1800s. Brazil had more slaves imported and they lived with brutal conditions, yet it was abolished without violence, compared to the United States. Slaves in both countries attempted to escape differently, too. These two foundations of slavery were different,
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had the largest slave community due to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In fact, the United States was in charge of more than one-fifth of the entire slave trade (Eltis, 2008). According to historian George Fredrickson, slavery occurred because wage labor was less efficient where there was plenty of land (Fredrickson, 1981). The escape alternative for workers leads to relatively high wages and mobile labor is incompatible. Slavery was an escape from the harsh possibilities of communist uprising and the relentless rivalry of laissez-faire capitalism (Tetlock et al., 1994). The most common labor arrangement during the times of slavery in North America was indentured servitude. Indentured servitude lead to a higher acceptance of slavery and ended general servitude as the main form of labor (Watson, 2014). Indentured servitude became established in the early 1600s in one of America’s earliest colonies, Jamestown. Indentured servitude made it reasonable for those deported from numerous European countries to adventure into the New World and was a typical practice that was crucial to the economic and social advancements of colonial America (Snyder, 2007). Indentured servitude also had long-term debt which created a suspect menial class once the debt was paid off. The property qualifications continued well into the 19th century. Indentured servitude was one of the things that led to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. More than twelve million people came to the …show more content…
More than three million Africans were imported to Brazil in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 15th century. Portuguese natives needed slaves to work in their large estates. Slaves often worked as miners and harvested sugar. Slavery was a type of trade that included an exchange of products that included not just the slave's body, and his or her potential work, but also civilization that was perceived as a social request, as a procedure and a last condition of development realized by reason (Schultz, 2013). Like the United States, sugar was one of the first consumer goods in Brazil. Slave labor drove the sugar economy during this time. The eastern state of Bahia kept on creating sugar during the time of the contraband slave trade and received nearly one hundred thousand slaves that were imported in Brazil somewhere around 1831 and 1851 (Marques, 2015). In 1872, slaves made up one million of the Brazilian population (O’Rourke, 2014). Brazil wanted to end the slavery however so they signed a treaty with the United Kingdom so slavery could end in three years. Brazil chose to prosecute the slave owners and anybody occupied with the slave trade, by setting fines on and physically abusing them. They likewise implemented the law that any slave vessels coming to Brazil would be confiscated. Brazil was one of the last countries in the Western world to abolish slavery. Slaves were extremely