I hope my question doesn’t offend anyone I genuinely want actual facts.
In some parts in Europe people often say that we tricked the Africans by buying their people with things like glass that look valuable but aren’t, but I don’t believe this to be true because it blames the African people and portrays them as stupid etc, so I wondered how it actually happened/started.
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At the dawn of the Age of Exploration, Europe was virtually alone in not having slavery (although this was not universal). Everywhere else – including Africa – generally had a slave trade.
However, slaves aren’t actually all that useful in most cases. A slave requires that you feed/house them, so you need to find some sort of useful labor for them that offsets the costs of keeping them. At the level of technology we’re talking about, this was mostly limited to large-scale cash crop plantation agriculture.
Once the Europeans discovered the New World, they also discovered new cash crops – sugar and tobacco mostly – that provided that demand for labor. So they simply went to the pre-existing slave markets in Africa and purchased slaves to work their plantations in the New World.
In terms of what they used to purchase them, it was mainly manufactured goods.
And, yes, this includes glass. However, the Africans who were exchanging slaves for glass weren’t doing so because they were foolish or believed that glass was actually gemstones. They were doing so because glass was rare, difficult to manufacture and very useful. They knew perfectly well what they were getting and were more than happy with the trade – especially given that they had no particular need for the slaves and the cost of acquiring new slaves was far less than the cost of acquiring other trade goods.
Also, Africans weren’t enslaving ‘their’ people. They were primarily enslaving other (weaker) tribes.
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