Slavery: Comparison Between Brazil and North America

History of the Americas

Slavery Essay:

Comparison between Brazil and North America

Brazil and the United States had different views on diverse subjects, one of these was slavery. Even though these two countries both had slavery as part as their society as it was practices was completely different. The slaves from these two countries came from the same place, Africa; this is where the similarities of the slaves that went south and the ones that went north ends. There are several dissimilarities between the U.S. and Brazil which indicate that in Latin-America slavery was milder; this is shown by the racial ties that existed between them, the recognition the slaves had and the religious support they received.

Brazil was land settled by the Portuguese in the 16 century, when the Portuguese land was invaded by Napoleon forcing them to flee to what is today known as Brazil. There was demand for work in sugar plantations, mining of gold and silver, and Brazil wood production. For these labors at first Portuguese enslaved natives from this region but because of the miserable conditions people became too ill to work this is why the Portuguese turned to Africans to produce these goods. Later on 3.600.000 African slaves arrived in Brazil by ships (Taunay, 2000, 1); they came from different regions and were at different stages of civilization and culture. These people were used to do hard work under the watch of their master.

The United States received its first settler in the early 1600s which was the beginning of a great tide of emigration from Europe to North America. Arriving to the new world people versioned as it was stated by John Smith "Heaven and Earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." At first it was hard for the new settlers to survive in this new land, they did not consider themselves capable of producing their own goods. They would not even take the natives in consideration to work for them it would have been too easy for them to rebel because after all these were their lands. So they resorted to bringing slaves from Africa, first of all these people did not know the land or understand each other so this was easier for the settlers to keep them controlled. "Almost everyone in the North American colonies was tied to the slave trade" (Video of America) this shows that these colonies had a slave based economy, the people from these places depended on the slaves.

In Brazil the racial ties between blacks and European was more open to mix amongst different races, but in the U.S. this mix between different races was not acceptable. In Brazil new races were created by the union of black people and white Europeans that colonized Brazil. "Brazil's range of skin color was once viewed as a racial rainbow" (Buckley, 2000, 2) This exhibits Brazils variety