dystopian
Veteran Member
if american did benefited from slave then why egyptian and roman didnt have slaves according atheists?
First of all, nobody said the romans didn't have slaves; they said that Roman civilization and its cities would have existed with or *without* slaves.
Secondly, you can not compare the use of slaves in the new world to the use of slaves in the old world; the two are very different scenarios. The reason slave labor was widely used in the Americas is because the colonial powers lacked the ability to import large numbers of its own population to work on the plantations. The European population of the new world was low; and they couldn't increase it fast enough to draw the profits they wanted. Western Africans were only too eager to sell slaves for a price the Europeans considered cheap.
European merchants and companies would sail for Western Africa with cheap cargo, which would be exchanged for slaves. They'd then sail to the colonies in the new world to sell the slaves at a massive profit. They would then load up on the valuable goods produced in the colonies such as sugar, and sold them at an even bigger profit back in Europe; at which point the whole thing would start again. This is the famous Atlantic Triangular Trade. The profitability of this route had a snowball effect on the number of slaves shipped west, which would eventually lead to a dependence on slavery when the European population of the New World became large enough to sustain the profits without the use of slavery: why use a European laborer who'll ask a wage when you can just keep breeding the slaves you've kept for generations?
So, did the Americans benefit from slavery? Well, not as much as the Colonial powers did, to be sure. But it doesn't matter whether they did or not, since the unique circumstances of the time make it impossible to compare it to the slavery of the ancient world.