ABSTRACT
The colonial system used Africans as slaves in the Americas for different reasons. Slavery never disappeared in Europe and in the late Middle Ages it was taken for granted that some people should be considered as property (res). In the scholarly language of the period, Latin, classical terms, such as instrumentum uocale (‘a speaking tool’), were used regularly to refer to what ordinary people in their vernacular languages called slaves, esclaves, schiavi, Sklaven, esclavos, escravos (cf. Carvalho 1987: 109). There was thus no opposition to slavery in late medieval and early modern European Weltanschauungen, and there is no reason to be astonished by its spread into the New World (cf. Varnhagen 1975: 222).
