The Slave Trade Practice Test

A historian notes that between 1500 and 1800 European powers increasingly justified African enslavement by emphasizing “racial” difference, hereditary status, and supposed biological inferiority, even as Christian conversion became less central to legal definitions of bondage. This shift helped harden slavery into a permanent, inheritable condition in Atlantic colonies. Which change best matches the historian’s argument?

In the early 1800s a British abolitionist speech claims that the slave trade’s “Middle Passage” killed thousands through overcrowding, disease, and violence, and that profit depended on treating humans as cargo. A pro-trade lobbyist counters that mortality is exaggerated and that plantations require a steady labor supply to meet European sugar consumption. Which type of evidence would most directly strengthen the abolitionist’s argument?