Economic viability of tobacco, cotton and sugar colonies without slavery?

I had thought that Africans were first used in the Caribean due to the extremely high mortality rate amoung European workers.

Something like that. They reasoned at the time that workers from tropical Africa would probably do better in tropical America than Europeans (or natives).
 
Be careful here. The presence of a specific trait, like sickle-cell, doesn't necessarily mean that the population has evolved it, and the presence of very, very small numbers of the sickle-cell gene in Italians doesn't necessarily mean that Italians are adapted to be resistant against malaria. The Northern Africans who invaded as part of the Muslim conquests had interbred at least a little with Sub-Saharan Africans who carry the sickle-cell gene, and thus by interbreeding with Italians would carry the gene in very small amounts to the Italian population. So the presence of the gene could simply be due to genetic diffusion and not adaptation.

True, but the basic point remains the same, namely that thay have African genes in addition to SC that may help resist malaria like it did for some of their ancestors. Of course, it is difficult to measure how helpful that would be without a specific genetic trait, so I hoped to use SC as a means of tracking trends of malaria resistance. So in other words, 1 in 10 Africans have SC, but all of them stand a better chance of surviving malaria than the average European, so for the Italians 1-2 in 100 have SC, but a considerably greater percentage have built up immunity to malaria from their African ancestors.

Of course, they would still only be the best of a bad economic situation compared to the slave trade, but if slavery is barred I doubt that the Europeans will go to Africa to hire them as wage workers with rights, so best of a bad situation might be the best the plantation crops can get with this limitation.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Hmmm. I think that those crops are simply going to be far less economically viable in the 17th and 18th centuries without slavery. Nobody is going to work in the brutal sugar cane fields without being forced. Judging from the very, very heavy death tolls among slaves in the Caribbean islands, malaria was probably killing Africans in droves as well as Europeans, though Europeans were even less resistant. There wouldn't be enough of an incentive for Africans to freely come to do the grueling work at such high death rates. I think that without slavery the crops that must be grown in the tropics will only be grown by the most unfortunate of European indentured servants and on a small scale in cleared areas.

One book I read on Brazilian Slavery claimed a slave only lasted about 10 years before he was worked to death. It was cheaper to bring new slaves from African than to establish a sustainable breeding population. Now the problem comes from separating the causes of death. It is like a very high % of the slaves that died had malaria, but the cause of death could have easily been another disease, lack of food, worked to death, etc.
 
Futhermore, you'll need an huge european migration to balance the effects of "no-slavery".

Going to convince the same ammounts of Europeans (even more to counter-balance the tropical deaths) than enslaved Africans OTL is going to be hard.

And forcing them to go in the same numbers would have "interesting" effects for both population and rulers "hey! Where are passed my tax-payers?"


Yes and no. Yes, you'll need a lot more immigration. No, you won't totally have to make up the numbers through immigration. Natural increase will also pay a role unless working in the sugar fields is a death trap, in which case you won't have immigrants either.
 
How would places like Brazil, Alabama and Jamaica develop?
Not until gold is discovered in the south, but it won't be the Portuguese to colonize it since they have no more the great revenues from the OTL slave traffic. I could see the French colony in Rio de Janeiro grow enough with Huguenot refugees and later settle the region of Minas Gerais, even reaching Mato Grosso later on.
 
Couldn't some sort of compromise be worked out? Say, the Portuguese purchase slaves, forcibly convert them to Catholicism, then free them and bring them across as indentured labour to work in the plantations? They might be able to be a special papal dispensation to buy slaves for the purposes of conversion. That would create some very interesting dynamics in the new colonies, where the children of the servants would be as free as everyone else.
 
Medieval America is an impressionistic timeline. If you try to figure out how you get there from our own world in detail or how the world fits together, you are doing it wrong.

So when you're thinking about 'Trade' or something like that, what you do is come up with a basic description of the the function and characteristics of trade in a medieval setting, and the animating principles, and then retrofit them on to the map.

Wrong thread? :confused:
 
Couldn't some sort of compromise be worked out? Say, the Portuguese purchase slaves, forcibly convert them to Catholicism, then free them and bring them across as indentured labour to work in the plantations? They might be able to be a special papal dispensation to buy slaves for the purposes of conversion. That would create some very interesting dynamics in the new colonies, where the children of the servants would be as free as everyone else.

If they had the leeway to buy slaves, then I'd imagine they simply wouldn't convert them, and just keep them as slaves for long periods of time, or keep them as slaves as a "reward" for converting them. Where would they be keeping these slaves prior to conversion anyway? Now, if children of converted slaves were automatically free, a large free black class would quickly be created, but there would still be such high slave mortality and massive importation of new slaves that the fields would still be worked primarily by slaves. Free people, even desperately poor ones, would probably rather try and live off the land than work under such horrible conditions.
 
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