Several scholars call African migration to the Americas as an involuntary migration.

Do you
agree or disagree with this statement? In your opinion how and why did Africans migrate to the
Americas? How was slavery institutionalized in colonial British America? And finally, in your
opinion was it race or class that was more important in colonial British America?
I agree with saying that the migration was involuntary they (at least mostly) did not
come here of their free will. They came here because they were sold into slavery. Slavery was
institutionalized over a slow period and was influenced by a labor shortage. Initially class was
the defining factor but then switched to race later.
No one if not very little African’s came to the Americas because they wanted to. They
were often sold by their own people. Many people became slaves because they were prisoners
of war, kidnapped, sold by their families, or even tricked by their own neighbors by asking them
to help carry something to a ‘factory’ and without even knowing it were sold into slavery. Kings
sold people who committed minor offences into slavery without regard to their previous
positions and possessions. In times of famine people would offer themselves to become slaves
just so they could eat (How Slaves Were Acquired, John Barbot). All of this happened just so
they could meet the demands of European slave traders.
Slavery had already been practiced by the African peoples when they were discovered
and later exploited by the Portuguese in the 1400s.The Africans initially practiced slavery on
prisoners of war or as a means to settle debts and was often a temporary status (American
Civilization, A Brief History. P.32). The Portuguese later sold African slaves to the other
European powers which turned a practice into a business; African chieftains and merchants
traded slaves for European goods such as textiles, guns, alcohol, tobacco, and food. They even
imposed taxes on the European slave trade and conducted raids on each other to acquire
enough people to meet demands and sell them off to farm cash crops (American Civilization, A
Brief History. P.33). There was a massive demand for sugar in Europe where it was difficult to
grow and fortunately for them Christopher Columbus introduced sugarcane to the island of
Hispaniola which nowadays contains the nations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in 1493
and was growing there by the end of the decade; many European rivals were scrambling to set
up sugar mills on this island and other islands in the Caribbean and even fought wars over the
best growing spots. Thousands of slaves would find themselves in lifelong servitude harvesting
and processing this sugar and later tobacco in the British colonies to produce lots of money for
their masters(American Civilization, A Brief History. P.34).
Slavery was first institutionalized in Massachusetts in 1641(Africans In America:
Indentured Servants) but white indentured servants were plentiful enough to meet labor
demands in the colonies until the 1660s where a low English birth rate, the great fire of London
in 1666, and a scarcity of land to give drastically lowered the supply of this labor. During this
period Virginia passed several laws benefitting slavery such as: whether or not an African child
is a slave or not depends on the status of the mother, being a Christian does not exempt you
from being a slave, and killing a slave especially as punishment is not a crime. In 1680 seven
percent of the population of Virginia and Maryland was slaves and would become 22 percent in
twenty years(Virginia Slave Laws) .
 Africans in America weren’t always slaves. An early introduction of Africans to the
British colonies was in 1619 when a ship whose name was unrecorded by history sold a cargo of
Africans stolen from a Spanish vessel for food. These Africans who had been baptized and given
Christian names they immune from being lifelong slaves by British law and where bought as
indentured servants and were entitled to the same dues as whites under the same contracts.
This began to change in 1640 when an African man named John Punch who was one of three
indentured servants who ran away from their contracts who were caught and tried was given
the punishment of serving his master for life, a sentence not shared by any white man
according to surviving records. This began a shift in policy from slaves being non-Christian to
being non-white(Africans In America: Indentured Servants).
Europeans did not treat Africans well. They took advantage of a system that was already
in place, and brought them to work lifelong jobs. Even if in some places they were treated the
same as whites a labor shortage soon changed the narrative in a negative light.(How Slaves
Were Acquired)( American Civilization, A Brief History. P.32-34)(Virginia Slave Laws)