After all other societies in the Americas had abolished slavery, Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to make human bondage illegal, in 1888. Slavery continued to exist in Africa throughout the twentieth century, however.
Mauritania, to cite one example, legally abolished slavery only in 1981. The end of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in several regions of Africa did not end exploitative forms of labor.
Ultimately, the path opened by the Atlantic slave trade set the stage for the rise of European colonization of the African continent, blurring and blending the history of these two human atrocities.1Despite the similarities and differences between the institution of slavery in various areas examined in this book, the inhuman bondage of Black Africans and their descendants shaped to varying degrees the economies, the societies, and the cultures of Western Europe, West Africa, West Central Africa, Southeastern Africa, and the Americas, which were all involved in these atrocities to some extent. After the legal end of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization introduced in Africa new modalities of forced labor that are remembered today by local populations as similar to slavery.2 What were the legacies of more than four centuries of Atlantic slave trade and slavery? Discussing the possible answers to this question allows us to explore the developments that followed emancipation in the Americas and to return our thoughts to the introduction of this book, in which I emphasized the enduring presence of slavery in present-day public debates in the continents that participated in the trade of enslaved Africans and Atlantic slavery.
The first Portuguese raids on the coasts of West Africa occurred in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the sixteenth century, slavery in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula had become a racialized institution. As West Africans and West Central Africans were captured and transported to the Iberian Peninsula, being Black and being a slave gradually became synonymous.
In the Americas, slavery ignited a process of racialization that was more than just an idea. Africans transported to the Americas as captives were assigned the legal status of slave for life. Children of enslaved women inherited this legal status until the rise of gradual abolition that in several parts of the Americas emancipated newborns. But even after acquiring their freedom and following the legal abolition of slavery in the Americas, freedpeople and their descendants continued to be stigmatized. Ultimately, slavery and the Atlantic slave trade engendered the political idea of race.3 In other words, race is not natural but rather a social construction according to which people subjectively classify other human beings through perceived physical features.Labor structures changed during the period that followed the end of slavery in the Americas. In rural areas, planters put pressure on freedpeople to keep them working for low wages. In countries such as Brazil, formerly enslaved people sometimes could provide work only in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter. These not-so-new exploitative systems also restricted the ability of newly emancipated men and women to acquire land. Despite a few exceptions particular to each region in the years that followed emancipation, access to civil rights was limited even in Latin America, a region where land ownership was also hard to achieve.