Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Of all crops produced on plantations in the Americas
and Caribbean during the 1700s, sugar was the most
important economically. Figure 3.6 refl ects the scram-
ble for sugar islands in the Caribbean, as the map names
Spanish, British, Danish, French, and Dutch colonies in
the Caribbean as destinations for slaves. Add the coffee,
fruit, and sugar plantations in Brazil and the cotton plan-
tations of the southeastern United States, and the destina-
tions of slaves on the map make sense.
The terror and destruction of slave raiding affl icted
large areas of Africa. Europeans and African raiders
exploited much of West Africa from Liberia to Nigeria
and inland to the margins of the Sahara. So many Africans
were taken from the area that is now Benin in West Africa
to Bahia in Brazil that signifi cant elements of the local cul-
ture remained intact in the transition. Today Bahia and
Benin have strong ties, and cultural exchanges are growing
stronger. The entire Equatorial African coastal region fell
victim to the slave trade as well, when Portuguese slave trad-
ers raided freely in the Portuguese domains of Angola and
Mozambique. Arab slave raiders were active in East Africa
and the Horn of Africa (present-day Somalia), penetrating
Equatorial Africa and often cooperating with Europeans.
Zanzibar, off the coast of mainland Tanzania, long was a
major slave market.
We know proportionately where slaves ended up,
but we can never gauge the full impact of this horrifi c
period. In
A Colonizer's Model of the World
, geographer
James Blaut discussed the sheer loss to African civiliza-
tions that occurred when Europeans and African raiders
enslaved signifi cant populations. The Atlantic slave trade
also changed the Caribbean, where on many islands the
vast majority of people are of African-Caribbean descent,
and few, if any, indigenous peoples remain. In combina-
tion, the slave trade infl icted incalculable damage on
African societies and communities, and changed the cul-
tural and ethnic geography of Brazil, Central America,
and the United States.
Although no forced migration in human history
compares in magnitude to the Atlantic slave trade, other
forced migrations have changed the world's demographic
map. For 50 years beginning in 1788, Great Britain
shipped tens of thousands of convicts from Britain to
Australia, where they had a lasting impact on the conti-
nent's population geography. In the 1800s, the U.S. gov-
ernment took lands from thousands of Native Americans
and forcibly moved tribes to other areas of the country,
many far from their traditional homelands. In the Soviet
Union during Stalin's ruthless rule between the late 1920s
and 1953, the government forcibly moved millions of
non-Russians from their homes to remote parts of Central
Asia and Siberia for political reasons. During the 1930s
in Germany, the Nazis were responsible for a signifi cant
forced migration of Jews from portions of western Europe
that fell under their control.
Forced migration still happens today. It continues to
occur, for example, in the form of countermigration, in
which governments detain migrants who enter or attempt
to enter their countries illegally and return the migrants
to their home countries (Fig. 3.7). In 1957, Papa Doc
Thousands
40
37,618
30
25,302
20
10
Figure 3.7
U.S. Coast Guard Inter-
diction of Haitians, 1982
to 2010
.
Courtesy of
Con-
gressional Research Service,
2011.
1,271 as of
08/17/10
0
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
Fiscal Year
