COLONIZATION, WARS AND SLAVERY: HOW THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE STARTED IN 1518

Bartolomé de Las Casas explained how the African transatlantic slave trade actually started in the West Indies: In August 1518, for 25,000 ducats, Flemish Baron Laurent de Gorrevod, of H.R.E Carlos V’s private Council, granted a license to abduct and transport 4,000 Africans from islands situated in the Gulf of Guinea to the Antilles to the brothers Centurione, Genoese bankers in Seville. These bankers, in turn, sold their license to various settlers, making a profit of some 275,000 ducats (Historia de Indias, 1527-1547, Book III).

Théodore de Bry, African slaves working in mines in the New World

In 1528 a similar license was granted to Bartholomeus Welser, a powerful German banker of Augsburg who claimed to descend from Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius! Carlos V provided the Welsers with privileges within the African slave trade as a reward for their financial contributions to his Imperial election in 1519. In 1523 they started their own production of sugar in Santo Domingo and were granted the entire Venezuela in March 1528. 

 

The number of sugar mills boomed, and so did the number of grants to traffic enslaved Africans from West African chiefdoms in exchange for brass and guns. “As a result, the Portuguese, who had long been capturing black slaves in Guinea, for whom the Spanish paid good prices, increased the trade by whatever means possible and the Africans themselves, seeing the demand, warred among themselves to sell slaves to the Portuguese”.

A King (Oba) of Benin receiving Portuguese traders in the 16th century by Angus McBride. According to Duarte Pacheco Pereira (Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, 1506), the Benin Oba “was usually at war with its neighbors and takes many captives, whom we buy at 12 or 15 brass bracelets each."

 

Some of the enslaved Africans “escaped their misery by fleeing to the woods and from there cruelly attacked the Spaniards” such that “no small Spanish settlement was safe…”.

At the end of the 1540s, Las Casas, who had promoted the replacement of Indigenous slavery by African slavery, eventually changed his mind. He recognized that the Portuguese actions against Africans in Guinea were no less unjust than the Spanish against Indigenous Americans in the New World.