ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your shmoop du jour,

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brought to you by the triangular trade -

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the coveted three-pointer of European commerce.

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[ woo! ]

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All right, take a look at this excerpt.

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All servants imported and brought...

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[ mumbles ]

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Wow. [ exhales ] And the question:

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Which of the following environmental factors

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

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as described in the excerpt?

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And here are your potential answers.

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All right, proximity...

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[ mumbles ]

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All right.

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So, what's this question asking?

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

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of economic growth for Europe.

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

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

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But there were also environmental factors that led to the boom

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

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wasn't one of those.

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Did the West Indies' A - proximity to West Africa

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

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

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from West Africa, and this geographical proximity

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

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

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naturally accessible ports and harbors,

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which is part of the reason that Europeans were able

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to establish a new trade operation so quickly.

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

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

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

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temperate climate and labor-intensive crops?

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Oh, yeah, the West Indies had a perfect climate

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for sugar and tobacco, two labor-intensive crops

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that would benefit from a large population of unpaid workers

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with, uh, no unions.

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

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would go to New England, where traders

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would buy manufactured goods.

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And those manufactured goods would go to Africa,

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where they were traded for more slaves.

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

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had large of swaths of unclaimed land?

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

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the West Indies was not an empty place waiting to welcome

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European colonists. The process of colonizing these small islands

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involved murdering or enslaving local inhabitants

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that had prior claim to the land,

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followed by the Europeans pretending that none of them

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had ever been there in the first place.

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

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

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go out to dinner.

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[ coins jingle ]

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