1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system. The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. 2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement. Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers 3) African know-how transformed slave economies into some of the wealthiest on the planet. The fruits of the slave trade funded the growth of global empires. The greatest source of wealth for imperial France was the “white gold” of sugar produced by Africans in Haiti. 4) Until it was destroyed by the Civil War, slavery made the American South the richest and most powerful region in America. Slavery was a national enterprise, but the economic and political center of gravity during the U.S.’s first incarnation as a slave republic was the South.
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