Why early American plantation owners preferred to import African slaves vs enslaving indigenous people.
In: Economics
Two reasons. The first is because of historical inertia. In the early Caribbean colonies, the planters did initially try to use the native peoples as labor. But the natives quickly began to die due to the introduction of European diseases and the conditions of labor. It became clear fairly quickly that another source of labor would need to be secured, so this is why they began importing African slaves. The life expectancy of slaves in the Carribean was fairly short, given the disease-ridden conditions of growing sugarcane in the carribean at the time. So they needed to be importing more slaves constantly, which created a constant trans-atlantic slave trade. Once that was in place, the obvious choice for cheap labor for north American planters were African slaves, not native Americans.
The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped – Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person. Africans didn’t have that option, and didn’t know the land of North America so it was thought that they would be easier to control.
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