Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "The Disturbing History of Tobacco | Empires of Dirt" video.

It is said in the video that slave traders went into West Africa to abduct locals for slavery. But to send teams of English/Scottish people into an area they are not familiar with to abduct people seems both dangerous, complicated and ineffective. In my understanding, the traders instead told leaders of the coastal towns that they were interested in buying slaves and then let the locals do the abductions, lock the abductees up and wait for the traders to show up. This also made the locals on the coasts business partners, rather than simply bystanders. It also helped local leaders gain power through diluting enemy states of their young men/warriors. It's a bit like Rhino horns. You don't have Chinese people going into Tanzania to kill Rhinos. Instead they tell locals they're interested in buying rhino horns and let local poachers do the shooting.
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If the average lifespan of slaves in those Scottish plantations was only 7 years, that must mean that the extra labor you could squeeze out of the slaves in that timespan would have been worth more than the cost of buying new slaves. In turn, this must mean that slaves would have been relatively cheap. But in other parts of America, slave owners actively got slaves to produce children, because even with the cost of bringing them up, it was considered cheaper than buying new slaves. That seems to present a contradiction. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
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