Land is far more valuable than both silver and gold, but it is not valuable without labor. Originally, Portuguese traders that first arrived to explore Africa in the 1400s were more interested in discovering gold than trading for captured Africans. However, their idea about this subject quickly changed when America first began to be colonized. African slavery in the Atlantic world devastated Africans and enriched Europeans, and these factors remain evident to this day. Europeans had three main options for labor: Natives, Indentures, or Africans. The only advantage of using Native Americans for labor was that they were already in America, so they didn’t need to be transported. On the downside, the Natives badly outnumbered Europeans and had
