Name: ______Date: ______

Station 2: Middle Passage - Atlantic Slave Trade Video

Use the YouTube video “Atlantic Slave Trade” to fill in the spaces below.

The Atlantic slave trade lasted from around 1400’s to 1800’s and spanned several continents including North America, South America, and Africa. More than 10 million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. Slave trade affected the economies and histories of large parts of the world. The three major crops grown in the colonies were cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco . There were not enough colonists or paid workers in the Americas to productively farm these crops and so to meet the massive need for labor. In order to meet this need, Americans looked to Africa where slave trade already existed. Americans and Europeans traded manufactured goods, weapons, and rum for slaves. African kings and merchants viewed the people they sold as criminals, debtors (people who owed money), or captives from war with neighboring tribes. Selling these individuals as slaves increased their power and protection from other villages. The voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas was called the Middle Passage. Enslaved Africans were treated poorly and faced crowded conditions.

After the video, answer the following question using information from the video:

Why did guns become so important in Africa as a result of Slave Trade?

• Gave villages/communities a way to protect themselves from invasion and gave them more power • Caused villages to continue a cycle of capturing slaves to trade for more weapons and goods • Caused an increase in fighting between communities