Chapter 15

I always like how the author of our book introduces the reading. He always starts off with some sort of story or fact that really gets me thinking about the topic and it always relates to my personal life, like all history! this chapter starts off with a very moving story of what a woman with african american descent wrote in a journal at a port. It is impossible to imagine what life would have been like if I was a slave, things would be COMPLETELY different, I can think of so many ways of how it would be different, but I have no idea what it would be like. Just reading about all of it is just jaw dropping.
I find it very interesting that the one thing people traded during this time was spices. I have never really paid much attention to spices unless I was cooking, I find it odd that they were so valuable. But then I had to think what the food must have been like. Probably not very good and very bland! Considering that almost everything we eat today has some sort of spice in it, I don't think I would enjoy eating as much without spices. I am sure that once people discovered spices everyone wanted some. It makes everything so much more tasty!
I like the picture on page 448 about the Russian fur trade. It makes sense that they found fur to be so valuable because they lived in freezing temperatures. What I was surprised about was the fact that they migrated so much according to where this commodity was available.
The graphs are especially interesting to me. The first bar graph about the amount of slaves traded is just ridiculous. I still can't imagine people treated each other like that, but we just live in a different world today and I have been brought up with very different morals than people back then. The second graph showed where majority o the slaves were traded to. I always pictured the slaves to be working on some rich southern land in America, which was true, but I had no idea that they were also traded to Spanish America, Brazil, and Caribbean. I was VERY surprised to see that that Caribbean had the highest amount of slaves traded there. Thinking more about it, there have been times where slaves were talked about in places other than America, but I have just seen more movies, read more books, or heard more stories about slavery in America. I am sure it also has something to do with the fact that I do live in America and majority of the history we learn through our lives is about American history. This would definitely explain why I have heard more stories about slavery in America.