Ever since King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain commissioned Columbus’s voyage to India and the navigator’s mistaken geography led him astray to a continent virtually unknown to Europeans, the interaction between Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas has never been the same. From 1492 to 1750, the social and economic transformations between the three continents have been vast and varied, but it is these unique changes over time that account for the relations between the White Man, the Black Man, and the Brown Man in the modern age. Starting with the rise of the encomienda and the birth of the sugar industry to the invention of the cotton gin and the near extinction of cottage industries, it is amazing what happened over the span of only a little more than 250 years.
The economic changes during this time period are astounding. Shortly after the Spaniards and Portuguese reached America, the sugar industry became highly profitable, but because sugar cane was so difficult to harvest, the conquistadores decided to purchase more slaves to do the work for them. Simply put, the high demand for sugar resulted in a high demand for slaves. But this increased need for slaves far more lucrative for the Europeans than the Africans because the European slave-dealers generally acquired slaves at a “wholesale” price (or even obtained them for free through kidnapping) and then sold them to encomienda owners for an astonishing profit. European slave dealers often gave African slave dealers mere trinkets, such as cowrie shells, in exchange for human beings they could later sell for horses, numerous bunches of bananas, gunpowder, and myriad other coveted items. Many times slave owners resorted to genetic engineering—selecting particularly strong slaves to procreate and produce strong children—to heighten the quality of their “goods”.
As sugar decreased in popularity, tobacco soon replaced it as the number one cash crop desired by European settlers and Europeans back home starting around 1620; it was usually grown in the modern-day Chesapeake area in modern-day Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Tobacco was not as tasking to harvest as sugar cane was, so the slave market experienced a slight dip. Settlers such as John Rolfe depended a great deal on American Indian labor and less so on African labor. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in the 1750’s is what catalyzed the largest demand for slaves in the history of the Columbian Exchange. Since the cotton gin could de-seed cotton so quickly, plantation owners needed more slaves in order to keep up with the machine’s revolutionary speed.
Equally intriguing are the social changes that occurred during this time period. There were no women on any of Columbus’ original ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, and the first British brides did not arrive until 1619, but the issue of women’s rights became important once women started coming to America. Settler women generally had more rights than European women because their society was less structured. Although there was definitely a hierarchy in the new Europeanized America, the social pyramid focused more so on class differences than gender differences. Because settler life was often so rugged (certainly in comparison to European life), women were often expected to complete manual labor. Middle and lower class women who lacked slaves may have helped their husbands construct the family home, take charge of the family garden, and do other grueling tasks, like churning butter and collecting pails of water. As more and more women came to the Americas, however, society became more structured. Only very poor women were expected to work outside. In fact, it was fashionable for women to sport fair skin, as opposed to today’s stylish tan, because it signified that a woman was refined enough to work indoors rather than outdoors under the harsh sun and even meant, perhaps, that her husband was wealthy enough to own slaves and indentured servants.
But European women who adopted settler ways of living were not the only ones who witnessed a social change during this period. In the early years of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, there were virtually no free American Indians and even fewer Africans. Even other Europeans were at times enslaved. But as the black slave population grew (at times seemingly exponentially), so did the number of free blacks—and European settlers now had to take this into account when establishing laws. It would not be until Abraham Lincoln’s the Emancipation Proclamation and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that the entire institution of slavery would be abolished in the United States. Unfortunately free blacks were not entitled to the same rights as whites, but they generally had more rights than their enslaved brothers. In some places, free blacks were allowed to own property and even run businesses.
For better or worse, the Americas were the meeting place of Africans and Europeans. From 1492 onward, the three continents engaged in a frenzy of intended and accidental exchanges—whether that meant trading recipes or diseases. Some of their interactions were economic, while others were social, but it should be noted that these interactions were never stagnate; they were often as varied and fickled as their handlers were.
