low to police the entire population of enslaved Africans, and also because local African tribesmen tended to know the land much better than white colonists and could more easily track runaways.

For those Africans who were put to work in the plantation economy, what they cultivated depended largely on what part of the world they were in. It is true that sugar was an enormously popular commodity in Europe, and the slaves of the Caribbean islands were typically put to this kind of work (for example, Spanish slaves in Cuba or French slaves in Saint Domingue). However, different soils grew different staple crops. In the American South, both cotton and tobacco were much more forthcoming than was sugar, and slave labor exploded in Virginia once John Rolfe discovered how to plant tobacco seed there. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries to the Illinois River Valley often did not demand agricultural labor of the indigenous peoples there at all. Rather, they worked with the native tribes in order to compile French and English dictionaries of native languages. In Africa, local ecologies supplied an enormous array of diverse products. Moroccan Africans dug up phosphates from the earth in order to make fertilizer, while slaves in the Congo harvested rubber from the rubber trees which grew there (the Congolese slave trade was one of the most sadistic and bloodthirsty examples of human exploitation, and King Leopold of Belgium has rightly inherited a reputation as a ruthless king). In southern Algeria, slaves were put to work harvesting cork for the production of French wine tops. The kind of slave labor in a given region depended almost entirely on the commodities that that region’s ecology would most readily allow.

During the Second World War, several colonial powers employed black Africans as reserve troops to augment frontline forces. In France, for example, these black African troops were called the Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese Riflemen), and the French deployed them at battles as significant as the Battle of the Somme Valley in 1940 (not to be confused with the much more famous Battle of the Somme in WWI). German Wehrmacht soldiers were often exceptionally cruel with captured African prisoners, as they believed them to be of low culture and unworthy of sympathy. Thousands of Senegalese Riflemen were massacred between 1940 and 1941 as a result.

Finally, urban African workers took on any number of roles, from being preachers to shopkeeper’s assistants to politicians to gaining their freedom and purchasing land of their own.

African labor was used in many ways.  In the southern United States, African labor (slaves) was used to harvest crops such as rice and tobacco. The demand for slaves increased when cotton growing became more profitable.  This occurred after the cotton gin was invented.  With the cotton gin, cotton could be grown easier throughout the entire southern United States.  The cotton gin separated the seeds from short staple cotton by machine. Before the cotton gin, the seeds had to be separated by hand.  This was a time consuming process.  Since short staple cotton could be grown anywhere in the South, the production of cotton increased tremendously.  Thus, more slaves were needed.  Another way slaves were used was to do household chores for the plantation owner. The slaves that worked in the house were called house slaves.  Slaves were used in many ways throughout the South. In the North, slaves were used in artisan trades and were even educated. Phyllis Wheatley was a Northern slave who was educated to be a poet.