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Transatlantic Trade & the Growth of Slavery

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Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts

Britain viewed its colonies through the lens of mercantilism — the theory that a nation’s wealth is measured in gold and that colonies exist to enrich the mother country by supplying raw materials and buying finished goods. To enforce this, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts (beginning 1651), which required that colonial trade travel on English ships and that key goods pass through England. Enforcement was loose — a policy later called salutary neglect — so colonists grew accustomed to significant economic autonomy, a habit that would matter enormously in the Revolutionary era.

The triangular trade and the Middle Passage

Atlantic commerce often followed a triangular pattern: manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, enslaved Africans to the Americas, and colonial raw materials (sugar, tobacco, rum) back to Europe. The transatlantic voyage that carried captive Africans — the Middle Passage — was a horror of overcrowding, disease, and death, killing roughly 15 percent of those aboard. Over the era, this trade forcibly transported millions and became the labor foundation of the plantation economies of the Caribbean and southern mainland.

From servitude to hereditary racial slavery

Early Chesapeake labor was mostly indentured, and the line between servant and slave was initially blurry. Over the late 1600s, colonies hardened slavery into a hereditary, race-based, lifelong institution through slave codes that defined enslaved Africans as property and made the status inheritable through the mother. Several forces drove this shift: falling death rates made lifelong slaves a better investment, the supply of English servants declined, and — crucially — elites sought a permanently subordinated labor force after the shock of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Bacon’s Rebellion and its consequences

In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led frontier Virginians — including poor whites and some enslaved and indentured Black people — in a violent uprising against Governor Berkeley over frontier defense and access to land. The rebellion terrified the planter elite by showing that discontented poor whites and Black laborers might unite. In its aftermath, Virginia’s leaders leaned harder into racial slavery, using legal privileges for poor whites to divide them from enslaved Black people — a pivotal moment in hardening the racial order.

Worked example

Briefly explain ONE cause of the shift from indentured servitude to hereditary racial slavery in the Chesapeake by the early eighteenth century.

  1. 1.Identify a driver — for example, the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.
  2. 2.Explain the mechanism: the rebellion revealed the danger of poor whites and Black laborers uniting against the elite.
  3. 3.Connect to the outcome: planters increasingly turned to permanent racial slavery and granted small privileges to poor whites, dividing the labor force by race.
Answer: Bacon’s Rebellion frightened Virginia’s elite by showing that discontented poor whites and Black laborers might join forces, so planters shifted toward hereditary racial slavery and extended modest privileges to poor whites, splitting the lower classes along racial lines and entrenching African slavery.
Checkpoint

The primary purpose of the British Navigation Acts was to

Watch out

Do not confuse indentured servitude with slavery. Indenture was temporary, contractual, and (in principle) voluntary; hereditary racial slavery was lifelong, inherited, and defined by law as property. The exam often tests the transition between them and its causes.

Checkpoint

One major long-term consequence of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) was that Virginia’s elite

Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.

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