THE TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT ARE RICH BECAUSE OF BLACKS(SLAVE TRADE)

The United States of America

Slavery transformed America into an economic
power. The exploitation of black people for
free labor made the South the richest and
most politically powerful region in the
country. British demand for American cotton
made the southern stretch of the Mississippi
River the Silicon Valley of its era, boasting the
single largest concentration of the nation’s
millionaires.
But slavery was a national enterprise. Many
firms on Wall Street such as JPMorgan Chase,
New York Life and now-defunct Lehman
Brothers made fortunes from investing in the
slave trade the most profitable economic
activity in New York’s 350 year history.
Slavery was so important to the city that New
York was one of the most pro-slavery urban
municipalities in the North.
According to Harper’s magazine (November
2000), the United States stole an estimated
$100 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of forced
labor between 1619 and 1865, with a
compounded interest of 6 percent.

England

Between 1761 and 1808, British traders hauled
1,428,000 African captives across the Atlantic
and pocketed $96.5 million – about $13 billion
in value today – from selling them as slaves.
From 1500 to 1860, by very modest
estimations, around 12 million Africans were
traded into slavery in the Americas. In British
vessels alone, 3.25 million Africans were
shipped. These voyages were often very
profitable. For instance, in the 17th century,
the Royal Africa Company could buy an
enslaved African with trade goods worth $5
and sell that person in the Americas for $32,
making an average net profit of 38 percent per
voyage.
Slave-owning planters and merchants who
dealt in slaves and slave produce were among
the richest people in 18th-century Britain, but
many other British citizens benefited from the
human trafficking industry.
Profits from slavery were used to endow All
Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library;
to build a score of banks, including the Bank
of London and Barclays; and to finance the
experiments of James Watt, inventor of the
first efficient steam engine.
As the primary catalyst for the Industrial
Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade
provided factory owners who dealt in textiles,
iron, glass and gun-making a mega-market in
West Africa, where their goods were traded
for slaves. Birmingham had over 4,000 gun-
makers, with 100,000 guns a year going to
slave-traders. The boom in manufacturing
provided many jobs for ordinary people in
Britain who, in addition to working in
factories, could be employed to build roads
and bridges, and in whaling, mining, etc

France


With over 1,600,000 enslaved Africans
transported to the West Indies, France was
clearly a major player in the trade. Its slave
ports were a major contributor to the
country’s economic advancements in the 18th
century. Many of its cities on the west coast,
such as Nantes, Lorient, La Rochelle, and
Bordeaux, built their wealth through the
major profits of triangular slave trade.
Between 1738 and 1745, from Nantes,
France’s leading slave port, 55,000 slaves
were taken to the New World in 180 ships.
From 1713 to 1775, nearly 800 vessels in the
slave trade sailed from Nantes.
By the late 1780s, French Saint Domingue,
which is modern-day Haiti, became the
richest and most prosperous colony in the
West Indies, cementing its status as a vital
port in the Americas for goods and products
flowing to and from France and Europe.
The income and taxes from slave-based sugar
production became a major source of the
French national budget. Each year over 600
vessels visited the ports of Haiti to carry its
sugar, coffee, cotton.

Netherlands

The Dutch West India Company, a chartered
company of Dutch merchants, was established
in 1621 as a monopoly over the African slave
trade to Brazil, the Caribbean and North
America.
WIC had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, but one-
fourth of Africans transported across the
Atlantic by the company were moved in slave
ships from Amsterdam. Almost all of the
money that financed slave plantations in
Suriname and the Antilles came from bankers
in Amsterdam, just as many of the ships used
to transport slaves were built there.
Many of the raw materials that were turned
into finished goods in Amsterdam, such as
sugar and coffee, were grown in the colonies
using slave labor and then refined in factories
in the Jordaan neighborhood.
Revenue from the goods produced with slave
labor funded much of The Netherlands’ golden
age in the 17th century, a period renowned
for its artistic, literary, scientific, and
philosophical achievements.
Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for
the Dutch in the form of precious metals,
sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee and cotton and
other goods, and helped to fund the creation
of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals
and city center.

Portugal

Portugal was the first of all European
countries to become involved in the Atlantic
slave trade. From the 15th to 19th century,
the Portuguese exported 4.5 million Africans
as slaves to the Americas, making it Europe’s
largest trafficker of human beings.
Slave labor was the driving force behind the
growth of the sugar economy in Portugal’s
colony of Brazil, and sugar was the primary
export from 1600 to 1650. Gold and diamond
deposits were discovered in Brazil in 1690,
which sparked an increase in the importation
of African slaves to power this newly
profitable market.
The large portion of the Brazilian inland
where gold was extracted was known as the
Minas Gerais (General Mines). Gold mining in
this area became the main economic activity
of colonial Brazil during the 18th century. In
Portugal, the gold was mainly used to pay for
industrialized goods such as textiles and
weapons, and to build magnificent baroque
monuments like the Convent of Mafra.

Spain


Starting in 1492, Spain was the first European
country to colonize the New World, where
they established an economic monopoly in the
territories of Florida and other parts of North
America, Mexico, Trinidad, Cuba and other
Caribbean islands. The native populations of
these colonies were mostly dying from disease
or enslavement, so the Spanish were forced to
increasingly rely on African slave labor to run
their colonies.
The money generated from these settlements
created great wealth for the Hapsburg and
Bourbon dynasties throughout Spain’s hold on
the area. But it also attracted Spain’s
European rivals, prompting Spanish rulers to
spend the riches from the Americas to fuel
successive European wars.
Spanish treasure fleets were used to protect
the cargo transported across the Atlantic
Ocean. The ships’ cargo included lumber,
manufactured goods, various metal resources
and expensive luxury goods including silver,
gold, gems, pearls, spices, sugar, tobacco leaf
and silk.
Port cities in Spain flourished. Seville, which
had a royal monopoly on New World trade,
was transformed from a provincial port into a
major city and political center. Since the
Spanish colonists were not yet producing their
own staples such as wine, oil, flour, arms and
leather, and had large financial reserves to
pay for them, prices in Castile and Andalusia
rose sharply as traders bought up goods to
ship out.
Prices of oil, wine and wheat tripled between
1511 and 1539. The great vineyards of Jerez,
the olive groves of Jaén, and the arms and
leather industry of Toledo were established on
their present scale during these years.