Slavery in the Atlantic Islands and the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic World

Abstract

Beginning in 1493, Europeans transplanted the slave system of the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western. Old World slavery's trajectory passed through the Atlantic islands before reaching the Caribbean islands and then the American mainland. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the transition was substantially complete. The Iberians created slave systems in their American colonies, and the later colonial powers – British, French, Dutch, and others – followed their lead. THE ATLANTIC ISLANDS Europeans first entered the uncharted portions of the Atlantic in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, landing in the Canaries and the Madeiras, Atlantic islands off the west coast of Africa. Portuguese and Castilian ship captains initially visited the islands for easily obtainable items such as wood and the red dye called “dragon's blood,” the resin of the dragon tree. In the fifteenth century, the Spaniards and the Portuguese established sugar plantations on the islands, where the three elements that were to characterize sugar plantations in the Americas were combined: large land holdings, a crop to be sold in the growing markets of Europe, and slave labor. The first two elements had been present earlier in the Near East and the Mediterranean. The third element – reliance on slave labor – may have occurred occasionally in the Mediterranean but was unusual there. The first stage in the transformation took place on Madeira.