Prior to 1820, the number of Africans crossing the ocean outstripped the combined total of all European immigrants by a ratio of 5 to 1. But it was no anomaly, and its legacies are with us still. The form of slavery that sprang up in the Americas was vastly unlike serfdom in medieval Europe or slavery anywhere else in the world. It was a mainspring of early economic development and the source of enormous wealth, in the form of unpaid labor, for white colonists and their political masters in Europe. The golden age of exploration, says Columbia University historian Eric Foner, was in reality a commercial enterprise, and slave labor made it profitable.
Most people believe that slavery was an aberration.
Actually, free labor was the aberration. Without slavery, the New World would not have been developed. Slavery thus became a vast, highly regimented labor system that stripped captive Africans of their dignity and personal identities, subjected them to merciless deprivation and brutality and sent them to die by the millions from disease, malnutrition, injury and abuse. Prior to 1800, slave-mortality rates in the Portuguese, British, French and Dutch colonies of Latin America and the Caribbean were so high that only the continued importation of more and more Africans kept the colonial economies thriving. An 18th- century Jamaican document offers a glimpse of the tremendous human cost.