The Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas

Abstract

This chapter outlines the major phases of the slave trade in relation to colonization and the evolution of the institution of slavery. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian Western Hemisphere relied on the enslavement of Africans, and as a result, tens of thousands of men, women, and children were deported from Africa to the Caribbean and the American continent for nearly four centuries. This chapter covers slavery in Peru and Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter also covers the topics of cotton, sugar, coffee, and chattel slavery in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and explores the similarities and differences in slave systems in the Americas.