Corn And Capitalism Summary

In Arturo Warmans book Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, he discusses the slave trade from the old world to the new world and how it affected the economy. Slave trade brought over many new crops to the new world along with many diseases, people of the America was not immune to. Africa was the main source of human labor and European countries like Portugal, dominated in the number of African slaves they were transporting. When Warman compared the both the new world and old world, we are able to depict exactly how different both sides of the continents are. For example, when the people from the old world came, they brought over diseases the people of the Americas were not immune to which causes many deaths. Also many different crops were exchanged between the two worlds. Many Native Americans died, and it increased …show more content…
I did not know a simple plant like the corn would have such an affect on slave trade. I thought British people were the main Europeans that transported the most slaves until I read this article. The Portuguese played a bigger role in the slave trade rather than the British. The author really showed the importance of corn in the slave trade and economy during the slavery era. Without corn, slaves would not have existed, neither would the fast growing economy of the new world. Warman starts the section of this book by mentioning that slavery existed every since the Islamic empire, but there wasn’t any record of how many people were being slaves. In my opinion, I felt as if Warman would’ve have been more successful in writing this section of the book if he elaborated on corn more than the history of slave trade. If there were more history of the corn, we would’ve depicted more connections between slavery and the plant corn. Overall I was able to see the connection of corn and slave