Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century, and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West and Central African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Western hemisphere. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids. This was primarily because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade due to malaria that was endemic to the African continent. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on slave labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which were vying with one another to create overseas empires. The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to transport slaves across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil. Other Europeans soon followed. Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants. The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves. As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.
The major Atlantic slave trading nations, in order of trade volume, were Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark. Several had established outposts on the African coast, where they purchased slaves from local African leaders. These slaves were managed by a factor, who was established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were imprisoned in trading posts known as factories while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate, with between 1.2 and 2.4 million dying during the voyage, and millions more in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival in the New World. Millions of people also died as a result of slave raids, wars, and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders. Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. It was generally thought that the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1867, but evidence was later found of voyages until 1873. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade.
Background
Atlantic travel
The Atlantic slave trade developed after trade contacts were established between the "Old World" and the "New World". For centuries, tidal currents had made ocean travel particularly difficult and risky for the ships that were then available. Thus, there had been very little, if any, maritime contact between the peoples living in these continents. In the 15th century, new European developments in seafaring technologies, such as the invention of the caravel, resulted in ships being better equipped to deal with the tidal currents, and could begin traversing the Atlantic Ocean. The Portuguese set up a Navigator's School, although there is much debate about whether it existed and if it did, just what it was. Between 1600 and 1800, approximately 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa. In doing so, they came into contact with societies living along the west African coast and in the Americas which they had never previously encountered. Historian Pierre Chaunu termed the consequences of European navigation "disenclavement", with it marking an end of isolation for some societies and an increase in inter-societal contact for most others.Historian John Thornton noted, "A number of technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most likely people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce". He identified these as being the drive to find new and profitable commercial opportunities outside Europe. Additionally, there was the desire to create an alternative trade network to that controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire of the Middle East, which was viewed as a commercial, political and religious threat to European Christendom. In particular, European traders wanted to trade for gold, which could be found in western Africa, and to find a maritime route to "the Indies", where they could trade for luxury goods such as spices without having to obtain these items from Middle Eastern Islamic traders.
File:Caravela de armada of Joao Serrao.jpg|thumb|Portuguese mariners used caravel ships and traveled south along the West African coast and colonized Cape Verde in 1462.
During the first wave of European colonization, although many of the initial Atlantic naval explorations were led by the Iberian conquistadors, members of many European nationalities were involved, including sailors from Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Italian states, and the Netherlands. This diversity led Thornton to describe the initial "exploration of the Atlantic" as "a truly international exercise, even if many of the dramatic discoveries were made under the sponsorship of the Iberian monarchs". That leadership later gave rise to the myth that "the Iberians were the sole leaders of the exploration".
European overseas expansion led to the contact between the Old and New Worlds producing the Columbian exchange, named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. It started the global silver trade from the 16th to 18th centuries and led to direct European involvement in the Chinese porcelain trade. It involved the transfer of goods unique to one hemisphere to another. Europeans brought cattle, horses, and sheep to the New World, and from the New World Europeans received tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize. Other items and commodities becoming important in global trade were the tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton crops of the Americas, along with the gold and silver brought from the American continent not only to Europe but elsewhere in the Old World.
European slavery in Portugal and Spain
By the 15th century, slavery had existed in the Iberian Peninsula of Western Europe throughout recorded history. The Roman Empire had established its system of slavery in ancient times. Historian Benjamin Isaac suggests proto-racism existed in ancient times among Greco-Roman people. Racial prejudices were based on dehumanizing the foreign peoples they conquered through warfare. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, various systems of slavery continued in the successor Islamic and Christian kingdoms of the peninsula through the early modern era of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1441–1444, Portuguese traders first captured Africans on the Atlantic coast of Africa, in what is today Mauritania, taking their captives to slavery in Europe, and established a fort for the slave trade at the Bay of Arguin.File:Iberian Union Empires.png|thumb|right|A map of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empires in the period of their personal union
In the Middle Ages, religion and not race was a determining factor for who was considered to be a legitimate target of slavery. While Christians did not enslave Christians and Muslims did not enslave Muslims, both allowed the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics or insufficiently correct in their religion. This allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims. Both Christians and Muslims approved of enslaving pagans, who came to be a preferred and comparatively profitable target of the slave trade in the Middle Ages: Spain and Portugal were provided with non-Catholic slaves from Eastern Europe via the Balkan slave trade and the Black Sea slave trade.
In the 15th century, when the Balkan slave trade was taken over by the Ottoman Empire and the Black Sea slave trade was supplanted by the Crimean slave trade and closed off from Europe, Spain and Portugal replaced this source of slaves by importing slaves first from the conquered Canary Islands and then from mainland Africa. The mainland trade was initially from Arab slave traders, via the Trans-Saharan slave trade from Libya, and then directly from the African West coast through Portuguese outposts, which developed into the Atlantic slave trade and expanded significantly after the establishment of the colonies in the Americas in 1492.
In the 15th century, Spain enacted a racially discriminatory law named limpieza de sangre, which translates as "blood purity" or "cleanliness of blood", a proto-racial law. It prevented people with Jewish and Muslim ancestry from settling in the New World. Limpieza de sangre did not guarantee rights for Jews or Muslims who converted to Catholicism. Jews and Muslims who converted to Catholicism were respectively called conversos and moriscos. Some Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity hoping it would grant them rights under Spanish laws. After the discovery of new lands across the Atlantic, Spain did not want Jews and Muslims immigrating to the Americas because the Spanish Crown worried Muslims and non-Christians might introduce Islam and other religions to Native Americans. The law also led to the enslavement of Jews and Muslims, prevented Jews from entering Spain, and from joining the military, universities and other civil services.
Although Jewish conversos and Muslims experienced religious and racial discrimination, some also participated in the slave trade of Africans. In Lisbon during the 16th and 17th centuries, Muslims financed by Jewish conversos traded Africans across the Sahara Desert and enslaved Africans before and during the Atlantic slave trade in Europe and Africa. In New Spain, Spaniards applied limpieza de sangre to Africans and Native Americans and created a racial caste system, believing them to be impure because they were not Christian.
Europeans enslaved Muslims and people practicing other religions as a justification to Christianize them. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued papal bull Dum Diversas which gave the King of Portugal the right to enslave non-Christians to perpetual slavery. The clause included Muslims in West Africa and legitimized the slave trade under the Catholic church. In 1454, Pope Nicholas issued Romanus Pontifex. "Written as a logical sequel to Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex allowed the European Catholic nations to expand their dominion over 'discovered' land. Possession of non-Christian lands would be justified along with the enslavement of native, non-Christian 'pagans' in Africa and the 'New World.'" Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex may have had an influence with the creation of doctrines supportive of empire building.
In 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery issued by Pope Alexander VI, was used as a justification by Spain to take lands from non-Christians West of the Azores. The Doctrine of Discovery stated that non-Christian lands should be taken and ruled by Christian nations, and Indigenous people living on their lands should convert to Christianity. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull called Inter Caetera which gave Spain and Portugal rights to claim and colonize all non-Christian lands in the Americas and enslave Native Americans and Africans. Inter Caetera also settled a dispute between Portugal and Spain over those lands. The declaration included a north–south divide 100 leagues West of the Cape Verde Islands and gave the Spanish Crown exclusive rights to travel and trade west of that line.
File:Noah curses Ham.jpg|thumb|right|Noah curses Ham by Gustave Doré – the curse of Ham was used as a justification to enslave Africans.
In Portugal and Spain people had been enslaved because of their religious identity, race had not been a developed factor for enslaving people; nonetheless, by the 15th century, Europeans used both race and religion as a justification to enslave sub-Saharan Africans. An increase of enslaved African people from Senegal occurred in the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. As the number of Senegalese slaves grew larger Europeans developed new terminologies that associated slavery with skin color. The Spanish city of Seville had the largest African population. "The Treaty of Alcacuvas in 1479 provided traders the right to supply Spaniards with Africans."
In addition, in the 15th century, Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo invoked the curse of Ham, from the biblical story of enslavement, to explain the differences between Europeans and Africans in his writings. Annius, who frequently wrote of the "superiority of Christians over the Saracens", claimed that due to the curse imposed upon Black people, they would inevitably remain permanently subjugated by Arabs and other Muslims. He wrote that the fact that so many Africans had been enslaved even by the heretical Muslims was supposed proof of their inferiority. Through these and other writings, European writers established a hitherto unheard of connection between a cursed people, Africa and slavery, which laid the ideological groundwork for justifying the transatlantic slave trade. The term "race" was used by the English beginning in the 16th century and referred to family, lineage, and breed. The idea of race continued to develop further through the centuries and was used as a justification for the continuation of the slave trade and racial discrimination.