The Origins of Slavery in the Americas, 1500–1700

The wholesale enslavement by Europeans of West and West Central African peoples throughout the Americas was neither predetermined, nor was it the outcome of a series of “unthinking decisions”. ¹ Rather, beginning with the Iberian powers in the early fifteenth century, at different times in different places, it stemmed not so much from a backwards glance at the assumed benefits of the various slave systems of the ancient and medieval worlds of Western Europe as it did from quite self-conscious, pragmatic and forward-looking assumptions about the likely profits to be derived from the exploitation of this particular form of labour. ² Those assumptions interacted, or more accurately were conveniently made to interact, with self-serving European assessments of the human worth – or lack of it – relative to their own of both Africans and the newly encountered indigenous inhabitants of the “New World”. But these assumptions also interacted with something else that, until comparatively recently, has been largely ignored by many historians of slavery in the Americas: the continuing willingness, well into the nineteenth century in some cases, of many West and West Central African leaders to fuel the trans-Atlantic slave trade that evolved relatively rapidly during the course of the sixteenth century.