The Slave Trade

As Europe came out of the Dark Ages, having survived the Black Death plague, it was the sailors who led the enterprise of expansion. Lisbon became centre of this expansion and in the mid 15th century was the biggest city in the world.  

To facilitate this expansion, extra manpower was required, especially as the plague had decimated European population. The first slavers went East and it was Eastern Europe which supplied the original slaves. Hence probably the word Slave (out of the ethnicity of Slavs). There are official scribes who described the first slave auctions in the first half of the 15th century in Lisbon. 

 

A major historical event changed the history of the Slavs of Eastern Europe. Sultan Muhammad Fateh, conquered Constantinople in 1453 and the Byzantine Empire collapsed. The ensuing change, shut down the Mediterranean for these Portuguese sailors. They needed to go elsewhere. These sailors must have been tough, daring, hardened people. They went South and the need to open up the Atlantic became imperative.  

    

Along the coast of North Africa they encountered black people, who were generally Muslim. In search of trade and gold, they had discovered people. People meant slaves; and so the blacks of Northern Africa Atlantic coast, became the slaves. But the sailors needed legitimacy, and so Portugal applied to the Pope for approval. This was given. The authority allowed that in the battle of the Crusades, the sailors were allowed to ‘enslave the Muslim blacks of Africa for perpetuity’. Perpetuity. No hope, no freedom, a life spent serving at the wish of others. 

The rest is common knowledge. The Portuguese went South. They made friends of Kings along the coast, traded and at the same time bought or captured humans. Lisbon in the next 50 years became the hub of all trade. It became the gateway to Europe and very soon, as the Portuguese conquered Brazil, the slaves were also sent there, to expand the outpost of the Empire.

The Portuguese who entered as traders, soon set up plantations of sugarcane, coffee, dug gold mines and raided deeper and deeper lands to find more slaves. In just a few years, they found the blacks were actually not Muslims, as the reach of Islam was not that deep. So the actual authority of the Pope was itself irrelevant. Hence, a new ideology was coined, which has prevailed through the centuries till to-date. The mantra of the West! These people are backward savages, and we are bringing ‘civilisation’ to them. 

 

Armed with this ideology Portuguese adventurers and slavers could advance with impunity. They even turned on most of the agreements with local Kings. This of course sounds familiar. We saw the same with British in India. And yes, very soon, France, England, Dutch and Belgians would join in this trade. As early as 1595 in Sao Tome, the slaves revolted, burned and pillaged the plantation and factories. So, the Portuguese the ultimate masters of the seas of the 16th century, moved their industry and slaves to Brazil.  

This was the first century of slavery and of colonisation. They go hand in hand. The wealth of European nations (and later American) was thus built on illegal human slavery, who were in turn used pre industrialisation to be the work engine. An edifice built for centuries on the back of human bondage. It is also quite coincidental, that the slavery numbers declined (and disappeared) just as mechanical factories became cheaper than human bondage. Had that not happened would we have had an Abraham Lincoln and American Civil War?

* picture from monthlyreview.org