Slaveries and Emancipation

Abstract

It would be a mistake to consider that modern colonial slavery emerged only with the rise of the plantation system in the Americas. Long before that, sugar plantations using slave labor were developed in the eastern Mediterranean by both Venice and the Islamic powers. From 1450 increasing numbers of African slaves were shipped to Sicily, Portugal, and Spain, and others to the sugar plantations on the Portuguese-held Atlantic islands. Portuguese and Genoese merchants competed for control of the African slave trade, the Portuguese proving initially the more successful and establishing the pattern for later development of the transatlantic slave trade. On the North African coast they established trading contact with Muslim traders and authorities, transferred slaves from the eastern Mediterranean plantations to the “new” island plantations in the eastern Atlantic, and bought slaves with gold from West African authorities—exactly as the Muslim merchants did in the trans-Saharan trade.1 As early as the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese already traded 80,000 slaves per year along the Mauritanian, Senegambia, and Upper Guinea coasts.2