US History

U.S. History Study Guide

Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. While precise figures are difficult to arrive at, some historians estimate that up to 80% of some Native populations died due to European diseases. Many Native Americans died from overwork from colonial servitude, bad treatment, and disease. A priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, spoke out against this bad treatment, but most settlers ignored him. Ironically, Casa also brought up the idea for bringing Africans to the New World then later retracted his opinion after the horrors that transpired after witnessing the brutality of the Spanish. 2.12 Slavery in the New World Slavery had almost disappeared in Western Europe by the 1500s and it looked to be dying where it existed. Only Spain and Portugal still practiced slavery and in a turn of irony, these were the two countries that led the colonizing effort in the Americas, almost ensuring that slavery would be transported from Europe to the New World. The Spanish imported enslaved Africans to replace the many American Indians who died. Most of the enslaved Africans worked on sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean colonies. By 1650, about 130,000 enslaved Africans and their descendants had been brought to New Spain. The main reason for African slavery was European empires in the New World lacked a work force. In most cases the indigenous peoples had proved unreliable (most of them were dying from diseases brought over from Europe), and Europeans were unsuited to the climate and suffered from tropical diseases. Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be worked on plantations or in mines in the hot climate.

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