By 1500, slavery was thus practically dead in England, France and the Low Countries but theoretically still alive in legal writing.
In this part, we discuss how slavery continued to exist both in theory and practice between 1500 and 1800, as the great European powers expanded outwards and acquired colonies all over the world.
Common to all European powers was their interest in a peculiar sort of commodity: slave labour. Portugal and Spain were the forerunners. The former was the first colonial power to get an interest in exporting Africans to the colonies. The latter primarily faced issues as concerns the status of the native population in their American colonies, before they made the switch to African slaves. In their wake would follow the English, French and Dutch, who also made abundant use of slave labour. All in all, modern estimates believe that about 12.5 million Africans were shipped as slaves from the African coast to the colonies between the sixteenth and nineteenth century.138In essence, this part tries to give an answer to both a theoretical and practical question. The theoretical question asks how the legality of the institution of slavery was upheld in this era. To answer this question, we will continue evaluating what the writers of the Classics of International Law-series had to say on this issue.139 Second, I will try to shed some light on how, in practise, the main colonisers erected slave regimes in the Atlantic. Given that the focus of this book are England, France and the United Provinces, the Spanish and Portuguese slaving ventures in the American colonies will not be discussed in detail.140 Finally, although the Atlantic region was certainly not the only one where the European powers were engaged in slavery, our discussion will be limited to this region.141