15th And 16th Century Slavery

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15th & 16th Century Slavery

“New slavery began with middle eastern and north African Muslims, then carried onto the European Christians, who turned African slavery into an intercontinental business.” (pg 32 Enduring Vision 4th edition)”
Slavery already existed in the fifteenth century in west Africa. Kings and emperors owned slaves, and so did many families. Usually the slaves, and their children, were taken in to the owners family as time passed.
New slavery developed because the Portuguese needed something cheaper and longer lasting than indentured slaves. Indentured slaves were usually low status people in debt or prisoners of war. They also needed to replace the Indian slaves because they kept dieing from malnutrition and disease. New slavery started when the Portuguese started traveling to Africa. They saw the Africans already using slavery. They decided to catch slaves from some tribes and trade them to others for gold and silver. This became very profiting for them.
The Portuguese and Spanish created large slave labor plantations when they immigrated to America. These plantations produced sugar for the European market. The Europeans began shipping Africans over to work on these plantations. New slavery replaced tradition slavery. This is because the black slaves were not looked at like humans. Their black skin and different religion dehumanized them and made them in the Europeans eyes just a form of property. Because they saw them as property they didn’t care how hard they worked them, and only fed them enough to stay alive and working. The slave owners became very rich and slavery spread fast among the nation.
There were many differences between traditional slavery and new slavery. Traditional slavery began with people buying small groups of slaves. These slaves resided in their master’s houses. They generally worked in and around their master’s household doing domestic services. New slavery consist...