Plantation Slavery in the Americas
The establishment of plantation slavery in the Americas was one of the main outcomes of the fifteenth-century exchanges between Portugal and the societies located along the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa.
As explained in chapter 1, the Treaty of Alcáçovas, signed between the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile, put the mainland of West Africa and West Central Africa, as well as the islands of Madeira, Azores, and Cape Verde, under Portuguese power, making all these regions important to the development of the Atlantic slave trade. The Portuguese began by establishing sugarcane plantations on these Atlantic islands, and also on São Tomé, which along with the Cape Verde archipelago became a transitory zone for slave ships that would stop there to renew their water and food supplies before continuing the Atlantic crossing.As global navigation expanded in the fifteenth century, other European players joined the race to find a maritime route to Asia. King Ferdinand of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile married in 1469, unifying the kingdoms that would compose present-day Spain. Together, the powerful royal couple sponsored the first Spanish venture across the Atlantic Ocean led by Christopher Columbus. With his crewmen he sailed westward in search of Asia on board two caravels and one carrack in 1492. Weeks later, they landed in the Lesser Antilles for the first time. The voyage led to the iconic first encounter between Iberians and Native Americans, who had been established for thousands of years on the continents that would become known as the Americas. From North America to Patagonia, these first peoples organized their societies in a variety of ways. Taino inhabitants on the Caribbean islands and the Tupi-speaking peoples established along the coastal region of Brazil were both semisedentary groups, who relied on a shifting agriculture system.
Sedentary populations occupied the central Andes in South America as well as Mesoamerica (central and southern Mexico and Guatemala), where they created large empires and complex civilizations.In their first contacts with local populations and during their survey of the various Caribbean islands, Columbus and his crewmen quickly identified the presence of gold in the newly found territory. Further Spanish conquistadores explored Mexico and Central America, regions occupied by the Aztec Empire and the Mayan civilization, as well as the Inca Empire that stretched along western South America, where they, too, found gold and silver deposits. This search for riches drove the Spaniards to invade and conquer these territories, exterminating the populations who occupied these regions. The Spaniards fought and killed rulers and commoners alike during these wars of conquest, upon their initial arrival in the Caribbean and throughout their conquest of Mexico and South America. During this process, European conquerors spread diseases such as smallpox and measles, against which Indigenous peoples had no immunity. Most staggeringly, in just a few decades after their arrival, European conquerors killed millions of Indigenous men, women, and children through warfare and the imposition of forced labor regimes.7
When the Spanish took possession of the newly conquered land (as we have seen in chapters 1 and 5), the Portuguese had already been transporting enslaved Africans to the Iberian Peninsula. It is therefore not surprising that, during the sixteenth century, both enslaved as well as free Black men also participated as armed and unarmed auxiliaries in the conquest of Mexico, Florida, and the Greater Antilles, comprising the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Hispaniola (today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic).8 Among the most well-known of these Black conquistadors was Juan Garrido. Born in West Africa, he was transported as a slave to Portugal, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism and baptized, then moved to Seville, and reached Santo Domingo as a free servant of a Spaniard named Pedro Garrido.
After participating in the expeditions that conquered Puerto Rico and Cuba, and possibly in the conquest of Guadalupe and Dominica, and even Florida, he joined the expedition that conquered Mexico between 1519 and 1521, and he eventually became a resident of Mexico City.9 Once conquest was secured, Spanish colonizers transformed local servitude structures already in place to create new forced labor systems such as encomienda and repartimiento (or mita) to extract agricultural and mining work from Native American populations.10As the Spanish conquest evolved, Portuguese nobleman and military leader Pedro Álvares Cabral commanded a fleet of thirteen caravels that landed in Brazil in 1500, unfolding the Portuguese conquest and colonization of this large territory in the Americas. The Portuguese, unlike their Spanish counterparts, did not find sedentary populations along the Brazilian coast. Instead, the various Tupi-speaking groups settled on the littoral were semisedentary peoples who spoke languages of the same family. Again unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese failed to find deposits of gold and silver in the first two centuries of their occupation of Brazil. Instead, they established trading posts along the Brazilian coast, which allowed them to barter with the coastal populations. With the support of Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits of the Society of Jesus and the Franciscans, Portuguese settlers catechized and enslaved Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, who in the first decades of colonization worked extracting pau-brasil (brazilwood) that produced a red dye utilized in the European textile industry.
The slave trade to the Spanish Americas emerged in the sixteenth century. In 1517 the first enslaved Africans came ashore in Hispaniola, and later in the mainland area controlled by the Spanish, including the Viceroyalty of New Spain (or Mexico), a large area encompassing today’s Mexico, Central America, and several US states such as Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and California, as well as the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until the eighteenth century encompassed most of South America except for the region of today’s Brazil.
A few decades later, the New Spain’s Black population was increasing so fast that local authorities demanded that the Spanish crown restrict the import of enslaved Africans to prevent the colony from becoming predominantly Black.11 As the Indigenous population had decreased and the Iberian small population did not allow for a massive wave of migration to explore the natural resources of the new territory, the Spanish crown relied on the enslaved Africans to toil in its colonies in the Americas.The presence of enslaved Africans in areas conquered and colonized by the Spanish varied over time and depended on the size of existing Amerindian populations. In general, African presence was more prominent in areas with smaller or more scattered Indigenous populations than in the regions where enslaved African and Indigenous workforces were combined. Overall, the enslavement of Africans and their descendants was important, but it had a secondary role in the mainland Spanish Americas. Meanwhile, Indigenous slavery persisted in varying degrees in the territory controlled by the Spanish, as well as in various parts of the Americas.