The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Industrial Revolution

The Atlantic slave trade, as is implied by its name, was a trafficking business that sold Africans to the plantation owners of the European colonies in the Americas. As Justin said, these slaves were made to do manual labor, such as tilling fields, planting, and gathering the products. There were treated abominably, whipped for the slightest disobedience, hardly accorded any rights that you would any human being. In terms of investment, purchasing slaves if you could afford them made sense in the long run - you did not have to keep paying them as you would laborers, and they and their children were yours forever, unlike indentured servants. When there were slave revolts, the economy of the colony where they occurred was completely over-turned. An example of this was the Haitian Revolution. This trade ties in with the revolutions in that it contradicted them completely with oppression, lack of freedom and equality, and the immorality of the slave owners.

Though I do not know what actually happened in this revolution I would hazard a guess that the following might be true. The Industrial Revolution was most likely a product of the ideas generated during the scientific revolution. This Revolution though probably had more to do with executing these concepts than its predecessor. Concerned with making machines, this revolution would upend society not through thought, but through the economy. With machines to help people with work, a wide range of jobs available only to men before would become more easily done by women and children both. This, of course, led to issues of feminism (they now have both the ability and right to work) and child labor (working for lower pay and being taken advantage of). Even with the myriad problems that industry produces, there were many advantages as well. With work available to a greater number of people, more had the possibility of improving their station, further removing the class boundaries that they had worked so hard against in the French revolution. There is also now possibility for increased infrastructure. Generally, this type of revolution would better the state of living of many people, especially city-dwellers.