A New Era in Slavery

The European voyages of discovery initiated a new era in slavery. Slavery had existed since antiquity and flourished in many parts of the world. Some slaves were captured in war or by piracy; others—Africans—were sold by other Africans and Bedouin traders to Christian buyers; in western Asia, parents sold their children out of poverty into servitude; and many in the Balkans became slaves when their land was devastated by Ottoman invasions. Slaves could be Greek, Slav, European, African, or Turkish. Many served as domestics in European cities of the Mediterranean such as Barcelona or Venice. Others sweated as galley slaves in Ottoman and Christian fleets. In the Ottoman army, slaves even formed an important elite contingent.

From the fifteenth century onward, Africans increasingly filled the ranks of slaves. Exploiting warfare between groups within West Africa, the Portuguese traded in gold and “pieces,” as African slaves were called, a practice condemned at home by some conscientious clergy. Critical voices, however, could not deny the potential for profits that the slave trade brought to Portugal. Most slaves toiled in the sugar plantations that the Portuguese established on the Atlantic islands and in Brazil. African freedmen and slaves—some thirty-five thousand in the early sixteenth century—constituted almost 3 percent of the population of Portugal, a percentage that was much higher than in other European countries.

In the Americas, slavery would expand enormously in the following centuries. Even outspoken critics of colonial brutality toward indigenous peoples defended the development of African slavery. The Spanish Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), for example, argued that Africans were constitutionally more suitable for labor than native Americans and should therefore be imported to the plantations in the Americas to relieve the indigenous peoples, who were being worked to death.