West Africans where brought to say Brazil because they where mostly from peoples adapted to tropical agriculture while say enslaved Native Americans in the region where mostly hunter gatherers. Not only did forager Native Americans find slavery/serfdom more psychologically troubling than farmer folk, they where not resistant to the diseases that Europeans brought with them either. Their numbers dropped rapidly.
Africa was just the nearest big market where you could buy lots of Old World farmer slaves. I mean sure you could buy some from the Arabs, but they got most of theirs from Africa as well, why go through a middle man when you can sail directly there and deal with local merchants?
Also once you brought lots of Africans you bring with them African tropical diseases which again hit the few remaining Native Americans very hard and made the bad idea of say using imported slave Slavic or Irish labour in a tropical climate even worse.
Basically once you get Africans to a place like Cuba or Haiti they will tend to eventually displace Europeans and Native Americans and almost anyone else too because they are better adapted. I find it telling that in the Caribbean nations that aren’t majority Mulatto or Black you often find a large population of Indians (another people that has experienced thousands of years of selection for agricultural work in a tropical climate with a lots of pathogens making life miserable).
I do think the well know measured achievement gap probably is partially (but perhaps insignificantly so) genetic and probably was already around at the time, but I’m not sure it was as large as it is today. Askenazi Jews apparently needed less than a millennium to get one standard deviation IQ advantage over other Europeans, so telling how clever each people was in ancient times is tricky. Also one shouldn’t forget the evidence that urban civilization seems to often be dysgenic.
West Africans where brought to say Brazil because they where mostly from peoples adapted to tropical agriculture while say enslaved Native Americans in the region where mostly hunter gatherers. Not only did forager Native Americans find slavery/serfdom more psychologically troubling than farmer folk, they where not resistant to the diseases that Europeans brought with them either. Their numbers dropped rapidly.
Africa was just the nearest big market where you could buy lots of Old World farmer slaves. I mean sure you could buy some from the Arabs, but they got most of theirs from Africa as well, why go through a middle man when you can sail directly there and deal with local merchants?
Also once you brought lots of Africans you bring with them African tropical diseases which again hit the few remaining Native Americans very hard and made the bad idea of say using imported slave Slavic or Irish labour in a tropical climate even worse.
Basically once you get Africans to a place like Cuba or Haiti they will tend to eventually displace Europeans and Native Americans and almost anyone else too because they are better adapted. I find it telling that in the Caribbean nations that aren’t majority Mulatto or Black you often find a large population of Indians (another people that has experienced thousands of years of selection for agricultural work in a tropical climate with a lots of pathogens making life miserable).
I do think the well know measured achievement gap probably is partially (but perhaps insignificantly so) genetic and probably was already around at the time, but I’m not sure it was as large as it is today. Askenazi Jews apparently needed less than a millennium to get one standard deviation IQ advantage over other Europeans, so telling how clever each people was in ancient times is tricky. Also one shouldn’t forget the evidence that urban civilization seems to often be dysgenic.