Final answer:
Joe Feagin describes the enslavement of Africans by Europeans as a notably barbaric period in history, emphasizing the role of the transatlantic slave trade and the European concepts of racial superiority that fueled it. Despite African complicity in the trade, the European system was more exploitative and inhumane, contributing significantly to the building of the Western world and subjecting enslaved Africans to severe cruelty, which they strongly resisted.
Step-by-step explanation:
According to Joe Feagin, the enslavement of Africans is one of the most savage and barbaric aspects of European and American history.
The transatlantic slave trade was a major element in the wider history of slavery, a practice that spanned various civilizations but reached unprecedented levels with the European colonization and exploitation of the Americas. African societies were involved in enslavement before European influence, with various internal factors contributing to the availability of enslaved persons.
However, the scale and brutality of the transatlantic system, which Europeans operated based on emerging concepts of racial superiority, significantly exacerbated the severity and impact of slavery.
Native peoples and Africans both resisted enslavement, but their rebellions were met with harsh violence as physical, mental, and sexual violence became strategic tools of European slaveholders.
The sheer inhumanity of the conditions under which enslaved individuals lived is exemplified by the extreme measures such as mutilation used in African colonies like the Congo Free State. Despite the horrors of slavery, the enslaved Africans and their descendants were indispensable in the formation of the modern Western world, contributing profoundly to the development of new nations, including the United States.