ABSTRACT
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. Over the years, partly because of “Old World” ideologies, and partly because of the
realities posed by the indigenous peoples and the physical environments encountered by Europeans in the “New World”, the slave systems they introduced came to differ in degree but not in essential kind. It was during the latter part of the fifteenth century, albeit in an “unthinking” fashion, that the ideological and pragmatic pieces of the Western European jigsaw that would culminate in a conscious decision to enslave West and West Central Africans in the Americas were beginning to slot into place in the Iberian Peninsula. By this time, the Iberian powers had a close familiarity with African peoples. Years of North African, or “Moorish”, occupation of large parts of Spain had been brought to an end. Significantly for the future, the Spanish were willing to enslave some of those who remained within their midst. If any justification for this process was required, then it was to be found in the very traditional Western European concept that being captured in just wars – wars that were waged against non-Christians, usually Moslems – legitimated the captive’s enslavement. Also relevant was the degree of unification that stemmed from the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella
of Castile in 1469, something that helped encourage Spaniards to emulate their Portuguese neighbours. They began to look outwards, towards securing the wealth that might derive from establishing trading links with parts of the world that were hitherto unknown – at least to Europeans.3
