Slavery was well-known in most complex societies centuries before the establishment of the Brazilian colony by the Portuguese. Slaves were usually a small part of any labor force in most preindustrial societies and were most commonly tied to the household
economy. In a few societies, they were used in agriculture, mining, or other productive enterprises beyond the household economy.
No ethnic group escaped enslavement, and all societies treated their slaves as outsiders, rootless and ahistorical individuals ultimately held against their will by the threat of force. Because of
their legal position, slaves were also the most mobile labor force available in any society.
In the work they performed and in their lack of control over their own lives, slaves were not unique from other subordinate
members of their respective societies. Peasants were often in a temporary condition of servitude, some being tied to the land
on a permanent basis. Children, women, and prisoners often lived lives indistinguishable from those of slaves in terms of
the labor they performed or the rights immediately available to them. But it was the lack of ties to family, kin, and the
community that finally distinguished slaves from all other workers. True slaves were persons without the bindings and linkages
common to even the lowest free persons and who were thus completely dependent on the will of their masters
. Masters could use their slaves at far less cost in reciprocal obligations than any other labor group in their societies.
1Slavery as a system of industrial or market production was a much more limited phenomenon. Most scholars now date its origins
for Western society in the centuries immediately prior to the Christian era in the Greek city-states and the emerging Roman Empire of the period. Recent studies have suggested that for slavery as an “industrial” system to exist, there needed to be an important
market economy emerging with a limited supply of peasant labor and with abundant sources of slaves – usually via conquest or purchase.
The Roman case is unusual among known preindustrial societies because of the size and importance of both its slave population
and their economic role in the economy. It was one of the most urban premodern societies and had important international
trade. Slaves were used in food production
and other agricultural activities as well as in the urban crafts. It has been estimated that at the height of the Roman Empire,
the population of Italy contained some two to three million slaves, who represented a very high 35 to 40 percent of the total
population.
2Although slaves did not disappear from Europe until well into the modern period, slavery as a major economic institution collapsed
with the barbarian invasions of the fifth to the eighth centuries
A.D. The decline of urban markets, the breakdown of long-distance trade, and the increasing self-sufficiency of agriculture created
a situation in which slave labor
was no longer viable, and peasant agricultural labor again predominated. Slavery was reduced to household and domestic tasks,
and the early Middle Ages’ stress on defense and security led to the rise of serfs, were peasants who sacrificed part of their
freedom in return for protection by the local elite, and serfs and free peasants became the dominant labor force in Europe.
3At no time during this period of retrenchment did slavery itself disappear from Europe. Among the Germanic peoples on the northern frontiers, it remained important because of constant warfare, and in the non-Christian
world of the Mediterranean, slavery experienced a renaissance from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The Muslim invasions
of the Mediterranean islands and Spain brought the increasing use of slaves in agriculture and industry.
Despite this revival of slavery in the peripheries, slavery in mainland Christian Europe was confined to domestic activities
and a few other limited activities. Only in the more advanced Islamic Mediterranean world were slaves used in large numbers. But the subsequent conquest of these states by the northern Iberian Christians resulted
more in enserfment than slavery for the captured Muslims. By the end of the Middle Ages, the emerging power of the European economy was fed by an expanding peasant labor force. Although
the legal structures originating in Roman law were still intact in Christian Europe, the institution of slavery was not a
major force by the time the first Portuguese caravels sighted the Guinean coastline at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Slavery also existed in the African continent
from the beginning of recorded times. As in medieval Christian Europe, it was also a relatively minor institution in the
period before the opening up of the Atlantic slave trade
. Slavery could be found as a domestic institution in most of the region's more complex societies, and a few exceptional states
influenced by Islam may have developed more industrial forms of slave production. In these societies, moreover, the status
of slaves was not as precisely defined as in regimes in which slaves played a more vital role in production. Children of free
fathers and slave mothers would often become free members of the kin group; second-generation acculturated slaves would become
less subject to sale and assumed far more rights and privileges.
4African slaves were also to be found outside the continent as well. With no all-embracing religious or political unity, the
numerous states of Africa were free to buy and sell slaves or even to export them to non-African areas. Caravan routes across
the Sahara predated the opening up of the African Atlantic coast, and slaves formed a part of Africa's export trade to the Mediterranean from pre-Roman to modern times. Given the widespread
use of slaves within Africa, there was also an internal slave trade well before the opening of the West African-Atlantic routes.
Africans
were being shipped outside the continent in steady numbers for at least some six centuries prior to the arrival of the Portuguese
, with an estimated 3.5 to 10 million Africans being sent to Asia
, Europe
, and the Middle East. These forced African migrations contained more women and children than would the emigrants later participating
in the Atlantic slave trade
, and they also came from regions that would be only moderately affected by the Atlantic movements. The internal slave trade
also was biased toward women. To supply these two slave markets, the whole complex of enslavement
practices from full-scale warfare and raiding of enemies to judicial enslavement and taxation of dependent peoples had come
into use and would also be the source
of slaves for the Atlantic slave trade when this came into existence in the early fifteenth century. These pre-Atlantic slave
trades were less intense and had less of an impact on local conditions than the Atlantic trade. Their annual volume was lower
and was spread over more years than the Atlantic trade.
5The arrival of the Portuguese explorers on the sub-Saharan African coast
in the early 1400s represents a major new development in the history
of the slave
trade from Africa in terms of its intensity, the sources of its slaves, and the usage made of these slaves in America. Initially,
however, there was little to distinguish the Portuguese from the Muslim traders of North Africa. The Portuguese aimed at bypassing
North African Saharan routes via a route from the sea. Their prime interest was gold, with slaves, pepper, ivory, and other
products as secondary concerns. They purchased slaves as early as 1444, but sent them primarily to Europe
to serve as domestic servants. Thus, the new sea trade started as an extension of the older overland trades. The Portuguese
even carried out extensive slave trading along the African coast to supply the internal African slave market in exchange for
gold, which they then exported to Europe. Their concentration on gold as opposed to slaves was based on the growing scarcity
of precious metals in Europe. An expanding European economy
was running an increasingly negative balance of trade with Asia, and the direct European access to the sub-Saharan gold fields
helped pay for that trade.
6It was only with the introduction of sugar production to the eastern Atlantic islands and the opening up of the Western Hemisphere to European conquest at the end of the fifteenth
century that a new and important use was found for these slaves. As slaves once again became a major factor in agricultural
production within the European context, Portuguese interest in its African trade slowly shifted from a concern with gold and ivory to one primarily stressing slaves.
The first of the Crusades marked the revival of international markets for Christian Europeans and brought them actively into
the slave trade. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, Genoese and Venetians expanded into Palestine, Syria, the Black
Sea, and the Balkans, adding to their possessions in the eastern Mediterranean islands of Crete and Cyprus. These colonies
created a new impetus to slavery. A market in Slavic peoples developed in this period, which gave rise to the use of the
term
slave to define this status. Slavs, of course, were not the only peoples to be enslaved. On the islands of the eastern Mediterranean,
for example, Africans
could be found in the early fourteenth century, along with Muslims
from North Africa and Asia Minor and Christians from Greece, the Balkans, and northern Europe
.
Sugar was introduced from Asia to Europe during the Islamic invasions, but it was the First Crusade
at the end of the eleventh century that gave the Christians a chance to become sugar producers in their own right. In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian estates in Palestine produced sugar with a mixed labor force made up of slaves,
villeins, and free workers. After the fall of these lands to the Turks at the end of the thirteenth century, the center of sugar production
moved to Cyprus. Here Italian merchants and local rulers used slave and free labor to produce sugar. Cyprus in turn was soon
replaced by the Venetian colony of Crete and then by Sicily, which had been producing sugar for the European market
since the late eleventh century. With the fall of Palestine and Syrian centers to the Turks, Sicilian production temporarily
became preeminent. The Mediterranean coast of Islamic Spain
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries became another important production center for Northern and Western
Europe. The westernmost advance of European sugar production reached the southern Portuguese
province of the Algarve at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In not all of these cases was sugar produced by slaves,
nor were they the exclusive labor force in any particular area. But the identification of slavery with sugar was well established
long before the conquest of America. The techniques of sugar production and slave plantation agriculture
that developed on the eastern Atlantic islands and later in the New World had their origins in the eastern Mediterranean
in the early Middle Ages.
7As long as the Portuguese concentrated their efforts in the regions of Senegambia and the Gold Coast, they integrated themselves
into the existing network of Muslim traders
. The Muslims had brought these coasts into their own trade networks, and the Portuguese tapped into them through navigable
Senegal and Gambia rivers. Even their establishment of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) on the Gold Coast fit into these developments.
But the settlement of the island depot and plantation center of São Tomé
in the Gulf of Guinea and the beginning of trade relations with the
Kingdom of the Kongo after 1500 substantially changed the nature of the Atlantic slave trade
.
The Kongolese were located by the Zaire River (also known as the Congo River) and were unconnected to the Muslim trade before the arrival of the Portuguese. The Portuguese sent priests and advisers to the court of the Kongolese king, and the Kongolese king's representatives were
placed on São Tomé. These changes occurred just as the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and the Portuguese settlement of the Brazilian
subcontinent were beginning and thus opened the new American market for African slaves. The decimation of the native Arawak
and Carib peoples in the Caribbean islands and of the Tupi-Guarani speakers along the Brazilian coast encouraged the early
experimentation with African slave labor.
The opening up of the Iberian American colonies initially involved the reexport of acculturated and Christianized blacks from
the Iberian Peninsula
who were brought in the households of the conquistadores. But after the opening up of Brazil on the one hand and Congo and
São Tomé regions to Portuguese trade, a direct Africa-to-America movement
began to Spanish America as well. After 1500, the volume of this Atlantic trade slowly rose from an annual few hundred slaves
in the first half of the century to more than a thousand per annum by the 1550s and to more than three thousand per annum
by the 1580s.
8 Non-Christian and non-Romance-language speakers taken directly from Africa
, whom the Portuguese called
boçais, now made up the overwhelming majority of slaves coming to America.
Another major change came about in the 1560s as a result of internal African developments. Hostile African invasions of the
Kingdom of the Kongo led to direct Portuguese military support for the regime and finally,
in 1576, to their establishment of a full-time settlement at the southern edge of the kingdom at the port of Luanda. With
the development of Luanda came a decline in São Tomé
as an entrepôt, for now slaves were shipped directly to America from the mainland coast and from a region that was to provide
America with the most slaves of any area of Africa during the next three centuries. By 1600, the Atlantic slave trade
was to pass the north and east African export trades in total volume, although it was not until after 1700 that slaves finally
surpassed all other exports from Africa
in value.
9Just as the beginnings of the Portuguese slave trade had complemented a traditional trading system, the first use of Atlantic
slave-trade Africans
by Europeans
was in traditional activities. For the first half-century, the European slave ships that cruised the Atlantic shoreline of
Africa carried their slaves to the Iberian Peninsula. The ports of Lisbon
and Seville
were the centers for a thriving trade in African slaves, and from these centers slaves were distributed rather widely through
the western Mediterranean. Although Africans quickly became a significant group within the polyglot slave communities in the
major cities of the region, they never became the dominant labor force in the local economies. Even in the southern coastal
cities of Portugal
, where they were most numerous, they never represented more than 15 percent of the population whereas in other Portuguese
and Castilian port cities they usually numbered less than 10 percent. Africans were used no differently than the Moorish slaves
who preceded and coexisted with them. African slaves and freedmen were to be found primarily in urban centers and worked mostly
in domestic service. The city with the largest number of these African slaves was probably Lisbon, which by the 1550s already
had some ten thousand slaves, which rose to some fifteen thousand by the 1630s. In other areas of the Iberian Peninsular
, the impact of this first generation of Africans was also significant. About two-thirds of the slaves imported from 1489
to 1516 were African, and an average of about 250 Africans were imported annually.
10 By the sixteenth century, such central areas as Portugal and Andalucia already had large slave populations. By 1573, the
whole of
Portugal was said to contain more than 40,000 slaves, a large number of whom were sub-Saharan Africans.
11 But in general, African slaves even in Mediterranean Europe were few in numbers and mostly to be found in urban households.
Even the wealthiest European masters
owned only a few slaves, and an owner who held fifteen African slaves in sixteenth-century Portugal was considered very unusual.
Although slave owners
were wealthy aristocrats, institutions, and professionals – many of whom were also major landowners – they infrequently used
their slaves in agriculture. Slaves were sometimes to be found in rural occupations but never as a significant element in
the local agricultural labor
force because of their high costs and the availability of cheap peasant labor.
12Despite the important role these acculturated European-African slaves initially played in establishing the legal, social,
and cultural norms in Europe and then again in America for the Africans who followed them, the Christian and Portuguese-speaking African slaves were not the basis for the new European slave labor system being established by the Portuguese in
the Atlantic World. It was the Africans brought directly to the previously unpopulated eastern Atlantic islands beginning
in the first half of the fifteenth century who were to define the new plantation model of Afro-American slave labor. The use
by Europeans of African slaves in plantations evolved not in continental Europe with its acculturated slaves but in these
Atlantic islands.
Just as Portugal
was opening up the African coast to European penetration, its explorers and sailors were competing with the Spaniards in
colonizing the eastern Atlantic islands. By the 1450s, the Portuguese were developing the unpopulated Azores
, Madeira
, the Cape Verde Islands
, and São Tomé
while the Spaniards were conquering the inhabited Canary Islands
by the last decade of the century. Some of these islands proved ideal for sugar cultivation, so Italian merchants were not
slow in introducing the latest in Mediterranean sugar-production techniques
. After much experimentation, the most important sugar-producing islands turned out
to be Madeira, the Canaries, and São Tomé. Sugar became the prime output on Madeira by the middle of the century, and by the
end of the fifteenth century, Madeira had become Europe's
largest producer. The Portuguese imported
Guanches, the native Canarians, as slaves along with Africans, and by the end of the 1450s, Madeira sugar
was being sold on the London market. By 1493, there were eighty sugar mills
(or
engenhos) on the island refining an average of 18 tons of sugar per annum. Given the terraced nature of the sugar estates, production
units were relatively small, however, and the largest plantation held only some eighty slaves, a size that would be considered
moderate by Brazilian standards in the next century.
Madeira had a particularly sharp rise and fall in its sugar evolution, and by the 1530s, it was well outdistanced by competition
from the other islands. The Canary Islands were the next big entrant into the sugar-production race, and by the first decades of the sixteenth century,
the local coastal estates were milling on average of 50 tons per annum. Here, as in Madeira, Guanche natives were first used as slaves, along with Islamic slaves imported from Spain, but very quickly Africans became the dominant slave labor force on the estates. As on Madeira, there were more masters and sugar producers than mill-owners, and an intermediate group of small-scale, slave-owning planters evolved who worked for larger and richer mill-owners who
could afford the extremely high costs of establishing sugar refineries.
The final Atlantic island to develop a major sugar plantation slave system was the African coastal island of São Tomé, which, like the Azores, Cape Verde Islands, and Madeira, had been uninhabited prior to Portuguese penetration. By the 1550s, there were some sixty mills in operation on the island and some two thousand plantation slaves,
all of whom were Africans. There were also on average at any one time some five to six thousand slaves in slave pens on this
entrepôt island being held for transport to Europe and America. Eventually, American competition and its increasingly important
role as a transfer and slave-trade provisioning center led to the decline of the São Tomé sugar industry.
Thus, all the Eastern Atlantic sugar islands
went through a boom-and-bust cycle that rarely lasted more than a century. But all the major sugar-producing islands
established functioning plantation slave regimes, which became the models of such institutions transported to the New World.
Non-Christian and non-Portuguese-speaking Africans directly imported from the African coast were brought to work the rural
estates on these islands. Urban slavery
and domestic slavery were minor occupations,
and slaves were held in extremely large numbers by the standards of European slaveholdings of the period. All the trappings
of the New World plantation system were well established, with the small number of wealthy mill-owners
at the top of the hierarchy holding the most land and the most slaves, followed by an intermediate layer of European planters
who owned slaves and sugar fields but were too poor to be mill-owners in their own right. A poor European peasant population
hardly existed, with only skilled administrative and mill operations opened to non-slave-owning whites. The lowest layer consisted
of the mass of black slaves who made up the majority of the labor force as well as of the population as a whole. Thus, well
before the massive transplantation of Africans across the Atlantic, the American slave plantation system had already been
born.
13It was the establishment of the Portuguese
colony of Brazil after 1500 that was to mark the beginnings of the modern slave plantation economy of the Americas, which
so influenced hemispheric developments for the next four centuries. Although large slave plantations producing sugar had temporarily
appeared in the first decades of the sixteenth century in Santo Domingo
, by the middle decades of the century, when Brazilians began to establish their own slave plantations, those of the Spanish
Caribbean were in decline and would not revive again until the late eighteenth century.
14 It was thus the successful Brazilian system that would influence the pattern of all future commercial agricultural slave
regimes. What distinguished this American slave society from most previous slave societies was in fact the domination of slaves
as agricultural workers, their vital importance in the production of goods for the international market, and their importance
within the local societies. The French, the
English, and the late-eighteenth-century Spanish colonies would adopt the Portuguese American slave system as their own, and
so the study of African slavery in Brazil is fundamental to the study of the Afro-Brazilian experience of the 4.8 million
Africans who arrived on its shores. This history is also crucial if one is to understand the experience of the overwhelming
majority of Afro-Americans even in the Northern Hemisphere.
There has been an intense recent debate in the literature about why Africans became the primary group enslaved in the Americas,
which would eventually cause Americans to equate skin color with slave status for the next four centuries. Some have suggested
a special cultural or racial bias of the Europeans that allowed them to enslave Africans. Yet this seems a very strange argument
given the long and intimate contact that Europeans had with Africans from preclassical times to the early modern period and
the integration of these African slaves into a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicolored slave population
in continental Europe
and the Eastern Atlantic islands well before the opening of the Americas to European conquest and colonization. But the increasing
cost of non-African slaves does offer a possible explanation. The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean
and the consolidation of a powerful independent Moroccan state in North Africa closed off or made more costly traditional
sources of slaves from these regions. At the same time, the opening up of water transport to sub-Saharan markets made African
slaves considerably cheaper than they had been via the Saharan caravan routes. Enslavement of non-Africans
did not end, as the famous existence of Christian slaves in North Africa well into the eighteenth century demonstrated, but
it was no longer significant in the European slave markets by the middle of the sixteenth century. Given the steady export
of West African gold and ivories and the development of Portugal's
enormous Asiatic trading empire, the commercial relations between Western Africa and Europe now became common and cheap.
Western Africans brought by sea had already replaced most other ethnic and religious groups in the European slave markets
by the middle of the sixteenth century. Although Iberians
initially enslaved Canary Islanders, these were later freed, as were the few Indians
who were brought from America. The Muslims
who had been enslaved for centuries were no longer significant as they disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula itself due
to these powerful Muslim states in the Maghreb region, which closed the trade in Muslims to easy Christian European exploitation.
In turn, the expansion of the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean closed off traditional Slavic and Balkan sources for slaves
to Western Europeans, a move supported
by the Roman Catholic Church
that sought an end to Christians enslaving other Christians. On the other hand, the growing efficiency of the Atlantic slave
traders
, the dependability of African slave supply, and the decline of prices explain why Africans would became the major available
source of slave labor
for sixteenth-century Europe.
Thus, the increasing costs of slaves
coming from Europe
and the declining costs of African slaves are powerful factors in determining why Africans
became the major source of slaves
for America. Even then, they were not the only racial and ethnic groups enslaved. Until the late sixteenth century, American
Indians
were an important part of the slave population
, and they were dominant in Brazil until 1600. In fact, there were even well-known cases of Moorish slaves residing in the
Americas.
15 Thus, one can sufficiently explain the turn toward African slaves by standard economic criteria of supply constraints and
need not seek cultural explanations to understand this decision to use Africans.
But why was there a demand for slaves in the first place? This is a more difficult question to answer. It is evident that
the classic equation in all of America was that for the European conquerors, land was cheap and labor was costly.
16 Yet the existence of at least some twenty to twenty-five million American Indians in 1492 would seem to suggest that the
Europeans would have an abundant supply of labor available for the exploitation of their new colonies.
17 Moreover, Europe itself was experiencing major
population growth in the sixteenth century and seemingly might have provided the manpower needed to develop these American
colonies. Yet despite these alternative labor supplies, America became the great market for an estimated 10.5 million African
slaves who arrived in the course of the next five centuries, and it was in the New World that African slavery most flourished
under European rule. Until the 1830s, more Africans
than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually and, as late as 1750, it was estimated that more than three-quarters of the
emigrants to America were African slaves.
18Why did Europeans turn to Africans to populate their mines, factories, and farms in such numbers if they had access to conquered
Indians and large numbers of poor within their own borders? Initially, it appeared as though the few thousand Iberian conquistadors
would turn toward Indian slavery as the major form of labor in America. Already using the enslaved labor of Africans, Muslims, and Guanches in Europe and the Atlantic islands, the first Spaniards and Portuguese immediately went about enslaving all the American Indians they could find and keep. However, for a series of political, cultural,
and religious reasons, the governments of both Spain and Portugal eventually decided against permanently enslaving the American Indians. Both governments had just banned enserfment and other forms of semifree labor arrangements within Europe and were committed to the principle of free wage labor, at least in terms of their own metropolitan populations. For the
Spaniards, it would also prove more profitable to exploit the major imperial systems created by the advanced Amerindian empires
through their hierarchies of nobles governing major peasant populations than to enslave all workers through force. Although
African slaves would be brought to the Spanish American possessions in the centuries after the conquest, they never formed
the labor base of these societies and rather resembled in their use of domestic and of urban slavery the patterns then prevalent
in Europe.
The situation of the Portuguese, however, was entirely different. Their American possessions initially held no silver or precious
metals to be exploited or any other easily extracted resource that could pay for the high costs of full-scale colonization
of these vast lands. They would thus be forced to produce agricultural products for the European market and
would need large stocks of labor to produce these goods. In contrast to the Amerindians of the central valley of Mexico or
the highlands of Peru, the coastal Indians of Brazil were less easy to exploit through indirect rule. The Brazilian Indians
were not accustomed to major agricultural activity or taxation. Although the various Tupi-Guarani Indians were willing to
cut Brazil wood in exchange for European products, they were unwilling to change their semi-nomadic ways or abandon their
simple village organizations for such imported goods. Although the Portuguese initially had a large pool of Indians to exploit
and wholeheartedly enslaved them, this Indian slave labor
would eventually prove too unreliable and costly to guarantee the necessary agricultural labor force needed to maintain the
economic viability of their American colony. High levels of disease, constant conflict on the frontier with noncaptive Indians,
and an ever declining pool of Indians to capture, all made this an ever more expensive and unreliable source of workers. Finally,
the unification of Portugal with Spain after 1580
made the metropolitan government less sympathetic to Indian slave labor than the independent Portuguese state had been, and
the Spanish Crown consistently pushed the Portuguese planters to abandon this labor source.
Thus, for a multiplicity of economic, political, and even religious reasons, the Iberians
eventually abandoned the possibility of Indian slavery
. But what was to prevent them from exploiting their own peasantry and urban poor? Given the demands of both the metropolitan
and imperial labor markets, wages for Portuguese workers in Europe
were too high to make mass migration to America a cost-effective operation. With just over one million in population,
19 Portugal
was straining its resources to staff the vast African and Asian trading empire it was establishing from the early 1400s to
the beginning of the sixteenth century. Demand for labor was so high that there was no pool of cheap Iberian labor that could
be tapped for the initially quite poor lands of Brazil. With dyewoods
– a product easily worked by free Indian labor – as the only important export from its American possession, compared with
the gold
, slaves, ivory
, and spices from Africa and Asia, Portuguese America was a very uninteresting proposition for European laborers.
Given these constraints, and the history of sugar and slave production in their eastern Atlantic islands, it was inevitable that the Portuguese settlers in Brazil would use American Indians and then African slaves to create the first modern slave plantation system in the Americas. Brazil soon became the dominant
sugar producer in the Western world, and its organization of African slave labor became the model that all other Europeans
would follow in subsequent centuries.