Why did Africans become the slaves of choice in North America?
The question of why Africans become the people of choice to be enslaved in the New World is a question that doesn’t have a simple answer. Or it certainly doesn’t have an agreed upon answer. There is certainly a great need for labor in the New World, generally because the Native American peoples die at enormous rates when confronted with the diseases of the Old World, be it African or be it European. In some ways what we see taking place after Christopher Columbus in the post Columbian world, is a re-peopling of the world because of the enormous mortality rates and the holocaust of Native American peoples. But still, we had a choice of laborers – so why not the European laborers? We know that Europeans have no problem chopping each other up into small pieces in a series of wars. The Protestants don’t like Catholics and Catholics don’t like Protestants. And from the English perspective, there seems to be one particular population that does in fact seem slavish or appropriate to enslave.
