Slavery in European Cities
It is undeniable that plantation systems gave rise to a different form of racialized chattel slavery in the Americas. Most enslaved Africans transported to the Americas, in addition to descendants of theirs who remained in bondage, toiled on plantations.
Despite this, however, slavery cannot be wholly equated with the plantation system.3In the early years of European colonization, enslaved Africans and their offspring gradually became a significant part of urban area populations. In towns and cities of all regions of the Americas, bondsmen and bondswomen performed a variety of activities. The growing presence of African-born and Black bondspeople in emerging colonial cities of the Americas was neither a new nor an isolated trend but rather an extension of the wider Atlantic slave trade context. Put another way, as the notorious trade in captives from West Africa and West Central Africa emerged, the presence of enslaved persons categorized as “Black” became more visible in European cities such as Lisbon, Lagos, Seville, and Valencia.
Centuries before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, urban slavery was central to ancient Greek and Roman societies. By the late first century BCE, slaves composed 20 to 30 percent of Rome’s population. Nearly 40 percent of the Italian peninsula’s population lived in urban areas, including Rome, at the height of the Roman Empire in the first century CE.4 Since chattel slavery was not a racialized institution in Greece and Rome, Black Africans made up only a small fraction of the overall population of slaves in these two ancient societies. In Greece and Rome, slaves were property, but their humanity was recognized, especially in the existing legal codes. For example, Greek philosophers such as Aristotle conceived of slaves as part of the household. Given that communities, including urban areas, were formed by households, the acquisition of property was part of home management.
In this context, a slave was not only considered a piece of property owned by a master, but also an animate instrument.5Despite the existence of other forms of compulsory labor that are difficult to translate into modern-day terms, Roman and Greek laws clearly distinguished between free persons and slaves.6 Whereas free persons were born free, freed persons were former slaves, emancipated by their owners. Freed persons could become citizens in Rome, depending on how they became slaves in the first place and their trajectories from slavery to freedom.7 In Greece and Rome, slaves could obtain their freedom by purchasing it as well. In Greek and Roman urban areas, slaves were messengers, concubines, doorkeepers, chamberlains, and cooks. They also performed a variety of tasks in the household as attendants, nurses, playmates, managers, entertainers, shoemakers, street vendors, and even bankers. In cities such as Athens, slave owners hired out their slaves. They also owned wage-earner slaves, who worked independently and versed their incomes to their owners.8 Despite the many nuances of the slave legal status in Greece and Rome, several dimensions of urban slavery in Europe and the Americas, especially in Latin America, during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, such as the ability of getting emancipated, were similar to these ancient societies.
With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century, European powers began to transport African captives from West Africa and West Central Africa to Iberian port cities. These bondspeople were identified as Black, but once in the Iberian Peninsula (the region corresponding to today’s Portugal and Spain), they joined a slave workforce that included peoples of other backgrounds, including Muslim individuals, especially from North Africa, who had also been enslaved in the region for several decades.9 Unfortunately, clear estimates regarding the size of the distinct enslaved populations living in Iberian cities during the sixteenth century remain elusive.
That said, it is known that a significant part of the population in the region was identified as Black. But clearly determining their possible regional heritages and their legal statuses as free or slaves is a challenge for historians. Indeed, the use of the term Black (in Spanish negro and in Portuguese negro and preto) to refer to these enslaved persons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can lead to unwelcome generalizations. For example, in the Kingdom of Castile (corresponding to a region in present-day Spain), the largest group of persons identified as negro came from African regions south of the Sahara. Most individuals in this group were enslaved, spoke African languages, and could be Muslims or Christians. Still, Arabic-speaking Muslims (freed or enslaved) from North Africa with origins in regions south of the Sahara, as well Christian Castilian speakers with African ancestors but who were born in the Kingdom of Castile, could also be identified as Black. In addition, moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity) with African-born ancestors, as well as dark-skinned peoples from the Canary Islands, most of whom were enslaved, could be described as Black. Finally, Hindus or Tamils from India, and enslaved peoples brought to Castile by their owners during the period after the conquest of the Americas, could also be identified as Black.10 As a result, the term Black had a broader use in the sixteenth-century Iberian Peninsula than it would later acquire in the Americas, because there were significant groups of people other than Black Africans who had the legal status of slave in Europe.Historians estimate that the first enslaved West Africans officially disembarked in Lisbon in 1441. To respond to the growing influx of Black African captives, the Portuguese crown codified slavery in new legislation (Ordenações manuelinas) starting in 1512, which was supplemented with additional laws (Leis Extravagantes) over the course of the sixteenth century.
The new code defined Black slaves as escravos, whereas Muslims were referred to as mouros (Moors).11 The significant number of enslaved Black persons who lived and worked in Lisbon, then the largest city of the Kingdom of Portugal, is attested in King Dom Manuel I’s 1515 decree requesting the construction of a pit in which to bury dead Black slaves, discussed in chapter 5. An assessment of 1551 determined that the total population of Lisbon was 100,000, and 9.95 percent of its residents were slaves.12
Figure 8.1. Eighteenth-century tile panel representing a Black woman cleaning fish. Museu da Cidade (City Museum), Palácio Pimenta, Lisbon, Portugal. Photograph by Ana Lucia Araujo, 2022.
Other visitors also observed the large presence of individuals who they concluded were slaves in the streets of Portuguese cities during the same period. Flemish traveler Nicolas Cleynaerts, who visited Portugal in the early sixteenth century, not only stated that enslaved men and women seemed to outnumber free people in Lisbon, but he also compared Évora to a “city in hell” where “black people [were] everywhere.”13 These observations created confusion. Some historians assumed most of these bondspeople were Black, either born in Africa or locally, even though precise references to their origins are scattered, because the records were destroyed in the earthquake of 1755 and existing documents do not reveal specific information.14 For example, one of the records of this presence is an eighteenth-century tile panel depicting a Black woman cleaning fish (figure 8.1), today displayed in the Museu da Cidade (City Museum) at Pimenta Palace in Lisbon. Yet, although she was likely enslaved, the image does not allow us to identify the cook as an African-born woman, either enslaved, freed, or free.
Enslaved Black men, women, and children also lived in other cities such as Elvas, Braga, Minho, Lagos, and Porto. Still, it is probable that it was never the case in any of these localities that Black or enslaved persons generally ever outnumbered white Portuguese individuals.After all, the presence of enslaved Black persons in urban areas in the Iberian Peninsula was visible before the emergence of urban slavery in the Americas. Late sixteenth-century observers often described cities such as Lisbon as “chess boards” because of the equal number of people regarded as Black and white visible in Iberian urban areas.15 Similar trends were also observed in in Valencia and Barcelona in the Kingdom of Aragón, as well as Seville, in the Kingdom of Castile. In these cities, Black enslaved people may have been at least 10 percent of the total population at the end of the fifteenth century. Moreover, Black Africans and their descendants already made up the majority of the enslaved population in these cities during the sixteenth century.16 Black bondspeople also lived and worked in several other cities, such as Madrid, Barcelona, Córdoba, Cádiz, and Granada.
In various cities of present-day Portugal and Spain, most enslaved Black women worked as domestic servants performing many tasks. They ran errands and cleaned their owners’ houses. They were also seamstresses and cooks, and they could work as street vendors, selling food, supplies, and water.17 Enslaved Black men were pages, gardeners, doormen, carpenters, and porters. In addition to all these tasks, slaves owned by noblemen could work as musicians and entertainers. Black bondsmen also toiled in the workshops of craftsmen—shoemakers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and tailors. These enslaved men and women could hire themselves out and be hired out by their owners. Despite this significant presence of enslaved people in the region, by the middle of the sixteenth century, only wealthy individuals, such as nobles, members of the clergy, civil servants, businessmen, and owners of workshops could afford to own slaves.18
Although barely visible and in much smaller numbers than in the cities of the Iberian Peninsula, Africans and their descendants also toiled in other European cities such as London, Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Amsterdam.
Still, the status of enslaved persons who entered these European cities was often ambiguous because, in theory, the institution of slavery was not always codified in these European societies. In present-day Great Britain, the presence of free Black Africans dates back to the Roman occupation of Britannia, centuries before the development of the Atlantic slave trade. Africans and their descendants also lived and worked in England during the Tudor period, when the population greatly increased in urban areas, especially in London.19 With the rise of English participation in the Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans in the late sixteenth century, a growing number of planters and merchants transported bondspeople to cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, and London, where these enslaved persons worked in several professions such as pages, domestic servants, and maritime workers. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several bondsmen traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean to reach these port cities.When the Dutch Republic joined the Atlantic slave trade during the seventeenth century, the populations of its cities were increasing. The number of residents of Amsterdam dramatically grew from 30,000 in 1585 to 200,000 in 1670.20 Free and enslaved Africans gradually reached cities such as Utrecht, Rotterdam, and Leiden. Estimates of Amsterdam’s very small Black enslaved population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are unknown because, as in England, slavery had no legal grounds in the Dutch Republic. Still, European slave owners and slave merchants frequently brought their slaves to the city, where they remained in bondage.21 Similar to England, most enslaved persons who settled in Amsterdam permanently or temporarily worked as domestic servants, but enslaved and free Africans also worked for the Dutch West India Company. These bondsmen came from the Iberian Peninsula and also from various regions of the African continent, including West Central African coastal areas, Cape Verde, and São TomĂ©, as well as the Gold Coast, where the Dutch established trading forts starting in the early seventeenth century. Enslaved people from the Americas, especially from the Dutch colonies in the West Indies as well as Brazil, where the Dutch were established between 1630 and 1654, also settled in the city.22 The traces of the presence of an enslaved, freed, and free Black population in Dutch cities during this period are visible to this day in the Netherlands. From The Hague to Amsterdam, several museums display oil paintings depicting Dutch noblemen and members of the Dutch merchant elite accompanied by Black pages. Some seventeenth-century paintings by the celebrated Dutch painter Rembrandt also feature Black models. Tombs of enslaved and freed people also survive in Amsterdam’s churches and cemeteries. Likewise, bondspeople from French and Danish colonies of the Americas followed their owners to European cities such as Bordeaux, Nantes, Paris, and Copenhagen starting in the eighteenth century.
Figure 8.2. Pierre-Bernard Morlot, Marguerite Deurbroucq, born Sengstack, and an enslaved woman living in Nantes, 1753. Oil on canvas, 64 × 51.6 inches. Photograph by Karine Garcia-Lebailly. Courtesy of Musée d’histoire de Nantes (Nantes History Museum), Nantes, France.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when slavery was eventually abolished in most colonies in the Americas, slave owners continued to bring their enslaved servants to European cities. Take the example of James and Sally Hemings, who were owned by Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson moved to Paris in 1784 as a minister of the new independent United States, the two enslaved siblings followed him into the French capital, where they lived for five years. In Paris, they were able to freely circulate in the city, learn new skills, and meet freedpeople and other enslaved men and women from the French West Indies who were sojourning in the city with their owners. Although French legislation in force at the time allowed enslaved people entering the metropole to petition for their freedom, none of the Hemingses took that path.23 In 1783, John Pinney, a British merchant and planter, brought his enslaved property, Pero Jones, from the island of Nevis in the British West Indies to Bristol, then the second busiest British slave-trading port, where he lived and worked in his sumptuous house. Today, Pero’s story is memorialized in Bristol, where a bridge is named after him. Likewise, many French slave owners brought their slaves from the French West Indies to spend long or short periods in metropolitan France.24 The presence of bondspeople in port cities such as Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle is evident in archival records and also in many paintings displayed in the Museum of Aquitaine and the Nantes History Museum. One of these paintings (figure 8.2) features a female enslaved domestic servant and her mistress Marguerite Deurbroucq, the wife of one of Nantes’s most prosperous slave merchants at the time. In the foreground, Deurbroucq is wearing a lavish floral white silk dress. Comfortably seated in an armchair, she is about to lift a coffee cup from its saucer that rests on a sophisticated marble side table next to her. The bondswoman, standing behind her and with head turned toward her mistress, is wearing a white dress and headscarf, as well as earrings. Around her neck is a delicate fabric and pearl choker reminiscent of a slave collar, perhaps intended to mark her slave legal status. The enslaved woman, whose position in the background confirms her adjuvant social status, holds a tray with a bowl of sugar cubes that she offers to her owner. Perched on Deurbroucq’s armchair, an African grey parrot holding a sugar cube in its beak completes the scene, evoking the wealth generated by sugar plantations in the French West Indies that depended on a workforce of enslaved Africans and their descendants.