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SLAVERY'S ROLE IN AGRICULTURE 1680 - 1870


Triangle Trade 1680 - 1880

The primary products of Triangle Trade were


Ships from Europe would ply the African coast purchasing slaves and selling them in the Caribbean (typically for on-sale to the United States ) before sailing back to Europe with agricultural products such as sugar and Cocoa . This makes a triangle on a map hence the term "triangular trade." Triangle trade did not really die out until the late 1880s.


A NATION BUILT ON AGRICULTURE 1700 - 1880


The Homestead Act (1862)

The government encouraged agricultural expansion more directly with the Homestead Act, passed in 1862. The Homestead Act offered 160 acres practically free to any citizen who was voluntarily willing to develop land for use of consumption and farming.

It was hoped that this opportunity would be more attractive to farmers because they wanted to expand the agricultural development in the western states. Practically speaking, this expansion did not successfully occur. There was simply not enough rainfall in the West that would grow healthy crops because the farmers did not have the amount of land that the Homestead Act provided.


MECHANIZATION 1880 - 1920

The United States was so well off with their production that it was helping to feed the starving victims of World War I. Technology was getting more advanced and farmers were able to make more money by sending fruits that had been picked that very day on a refrigerated railroad car and straight to the consumers. This idea of 'same day delivery' made it seem that everything was fresh and new, while overlooking the fact that in order to freeze food other things were put into them.


INTERWAR ERA 1918 - 1940


COLD WAR & AND AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION 1946 - 1970

Since the 1970's high technology farming, including new hybrids for wheat, rice, and other grains, better methods of soil conservation and irrigation, and the growing use of improved fertilizers has led to the production of more food per capita, not only in the United States, but in much of the rest of the world.


GATT , NAFTA : GLOBAL AGRICULTURE 1970S - PRESENT


SEE ALSO

Geography

Species under cultivation or domestication

Chemicals & agricultural processes


REFERENCES (FURTHER READING)

  • Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

  • (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998): 117, 119. The literature on

the “informal slave economy” and “collective labor bargaining” under slavery is growing. See Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), The Slaves’ Economy, Independent Production by Slaves in the
Americas (London: Frank Cass, 1991); Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal
Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

  • David Galenson, “The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert

  • E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: Volume I, The Colonial Era

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  • Jacob M. Price, “Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies,” in Barbara Solow (ed.),

  • Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).