Module 4

The purpose of the Slavery and Spanish Colonization is to talk about how they redeveloped slavery in America with the Native Americans and Africans. Christopher Columbus believed that Indians would serve as a slave labor force for Europeans, especially on the sugar cane plantations off the western coast of North Africa. Convinced that the Taino Indians of the Caribbean would make ideal slaves, he transported 500 to Spain in 1495. Some 200 died during the overseas voyage. Thus Columbus initiated the African slave trade, which originally moved from the New World to the Old, rather than the reverse. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain's experiments in enslaving Indians were failing. To meet the mounting demand for labor in mining and agriculture, the Spanish began to exploit a new labor force: slaves from western Africa. Slavery was a familiar institution to many sixteenth-century Europeans. Although slavery had gradually died out in northwestern Europe it continued to flourish around the Mediterranean Sea. Ongoing warfare between Christianity and Islam produced thousands of slave laborers, who were put to work in heavy agriculture in Italy, southern France, eastern Spain, Sicily, and Eastern Europe near the Black Sea. Most slaves in this area were "white" either Arabs or natives of Russia and Eastern Europe. During the mid fifteenth century the expansion of the Ottoman Empire cut off the supply of white slaves. It was during the mid fifteenth century that Portugal established trading relations along the West African coast, and discovered that it was able to purchase huge numbers of black slaves at a low cost. Several things made African slaves the cheapest and most the useful labor source. The prevailing ocean currents made it relatively easy to transport Africans to the Caribbean. Mainly, because Africans came from developed agricultural societies and they were already familiar with highly organized tropical agriculture. The first African slaves were brought to the New World as early as 1502, where they would mine precious metals and raise sugar, coffee, and tobacco the first goods sold to a mass consumer market.

This is a picture of slaves from Africa getting on boats to come to America in slave trades.
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-slave-trade--11