I have come to the conclusion that the reason for the enslavement of Africans specifically is too broad to explain with a single theory. Africans were picked and retained as the main commodity in the forced labor market due to a dangerous cocktail of situations that seemed to perfectly align. Firstly, slavery was already widely practiced in Africa. Slavery is an institution that occurred all over the world from the most technological advanced corners of European to the most destitute areas in the Congo forest. Once there were people and there was the existence of power, there was going to be slavery once in a while. The African continent was not exempt. Paul Lovejoy in the first chapter of his book, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, explains this, “Africa has been intimately connected to this history [slavery], both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilization, the Islamic world, Indian and the American and as one of the principle areas were slavery was …show more content…
Even David Brion Davis mirrored this sentiment when he stated that the development of sugar cane as a major cash crop and sugar as a sought-for commodity caused the slavery of the African populations in the precolonial periods. In addition to Davis’s sugar, Williams mentioned cotton and tobacco as major players in the need of a large and cheap labor supply. So according to the explanations of both Davis and Williams, racism wasn’t absent but it was a result of the buying and selling of black individuals. There is a truth to the assertion that racism was a symptom of the slave trade and enslavement of the black people. As Williams stated, “Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor.” But is it impossible to believe that a belief that the white man was too big and ineligible for slavery was not one of the main reasons that the black man had to do it. Eltis said it in his book, “Throughout Europe the state could take the lives of individuals in Europe but enslavement was no longer an alternative to death; rather it became a fate worse than death and as such reserved for