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AP U.S. History 1.4 Period 2: 1690-1754. Which of the following environmental factors did not contribute to the rise of the West Indies slave trade as described in the excerpt?

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Transcript

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:04

And here's your shmoop du jour,

00:05

brought to you by the triangular trade -

00:09

the coveted three-pointer of European commerce.

00:12

[ woo! ]

00:13

All right, take a look at this excerpt.

00:14

All servants imported and brought...

00:16

[ mumbles ]

00:17

Wow. [ exhales ] And the question:

00:20

Which of the following environmental factors

00:22

did not contribute to the rise of the West Indies slave trade

00:26

as described in the excerpt?

00:28

And here are your potential answers.

00:30

All right, proximity...

00:32

[ mumbles ]

00:35

All right.

00:35

So, what's this question asking?

00:37

Well, we know that the slave trade led to a large period

00:40

of economic growth for Europe.

00:43

Think about it - if you weren't paying your laborers,

00:45

well, you'd have some extra cash to throw around, too.

00:48

But there were also environmental factors that led to the boom

00:51

in slave trade. We just need to figure out which of the answers

00:54

wasn't one of those.

00:56

Did the West Indies' A - proximity to West Africa

01:00

have anything to do with the rise of the slave trade?

01:03

You bet it did. The West Indies are just across the ocean

01:06

from West Africa, and this geographical proximity

01:09

made it much easier to transport slaves from their home countries to the plantations.

01:14

Oh, and those islands? Well, they had a bunch of

01:17

naturally accessible ports and harbors,

01:19

which is part of the reason that Europeans were able

01:21

to establish a new trade operation so quickly.

01:24

But we're looking for factors that didn't contribute to the rise of the West Indies slave trade,

01:29

so it's not A and it's not C.

01:32

Was the boom in the slave trade helped by the West Indies' B -

01:36

temperate climate and labor-intensive crops?

01:40

Oh, yeah, the West Indies had a perfect climate

01:42

for sugar and tobacco, two labor-intensive crops

01:45

that would benefit from a large population of unpaid workers

01:49

with, uh, no unions.

01:51

But it didn't stop there. That sugar and tobacco

01:53

would go to New England, where traders

01:56

would buy manufactured goods.

01:58

And those manufactured goods would go to Africa,

02:01

where they were traded for more slaves.

02:04

So, could it have been that the West Indies D -

02:06

had large of swaths of unclaimed land?

02:10

[ chuckles ] Goodness, no. Like most of the Americas,

02:12

the West Indies was not an empty place waiting to welcome

02:16

European colonists. The process of colonizing these small islands

02:20

involved murdering or enslaving local inhabitants

02:23

that had prior claim to the land,

02:25

followed by the Europeans pretending that none of them

02:28

had ever been there in the first place.

02:30

So D is our answer and, hey, you know what else is

02:33

"large" and "unclaimed"? The bill when a bunch of slave traders

02:36

go out to dinner.

02:39

[ coins jingle ]

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