Social Sciences and History / Unit 6 SSH 0512 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Atlantic Slave Trade's Results: Reading the Key
The idea
Sample question four asks for a result of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade, and the key is that it stimulated European capitalism. The anchor's chapter five gives the mechanism. Europeans shipped about twelve million enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage; some ten million arrived, most to grow sugar in the Caribbean and Brazil. Cash crops went to Europe, finished goods to Africa to buy more captives: the triangular trade. Europeans, the anchor says, profited immensely, and many industries were enriched by the slave trade or the sugar production that depended on it. Chapter six adds the undisputed point: plantation profits were invested in capitalist enterprises, including the new factories. The costs ran the other way: population loss in parts of Africa and African industries harmed by imported goods.
In practice
Choose the option naming European economic gain; distractors will name African benefit or a decline in sugar. Given "the trade's three legs", the Americas, Europe, West Africa. Brooks, the witness, sets the same trade beside the first phase of what would later be called capitalism.
Where people slip
The trap is the debate the anchor reports on whether plantations were themselves capitalist enterprises; that is voiced as a debate, and the key rests on the undisputed part, that their profits fed capitalism. The figures are the anchor's estimates.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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