Introduction
African slaves did not come to Latin America (New World) out of their own choice. Such decisions were made for them through a combined effort of African rulers and traders who bought, enslaved and then sold them to American and European ship owners and traders, who in turn transported and sold them to slave owners in the New World. In actual reality, no African would have chosen his or her destination in the coffee, cocoa, sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of the Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean coasts. During the 1490s and early 1500s, individual Afro-Spaniards and Africans had accompanied the first batch of Spanish explorers traveling to the Caribbean. In the early decades of the 16th century, this number increased when Italian and Spanish entrepreneurs established sugar plantations in the New World, the first ones being on present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic which at that time was known as Hispaniola. The Spaniards then moved on to New Granada (Colombia), Mexico, Peru and Venezuela between the 1520s and 1530s where they introduced sugar plantations and Africans as well.
The first African Slaves to Brazil and the Caribbean
By 1600, Latin American plantation agriculture was very well established not in Spanish America but in the region of Brazil. This form of agriculture had been transplanted to Brazil by the Italian and Portuguese merchants and planters who had already established a substantial sugar industry on the Cape Verde, Madeira and Sao Tome Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Brazilian coastal regions of Pernambuco and Bahia produced more than half of the world’s sugar. When the plantations were established, the Brazilian planters initially obtained labor from the Native Indian tribes. But in the first half of the 16th century, the Indian populations of Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico were drastically destroyed by excessive demands for labor, enslavement and worst of all, by the new European diseases towards which the Indians had no immunity.
Indian deaths due to disease led to massive depopulation. Due to a series of cultural, religious and political reasons, both Portuguese and Spanish governments also decided against permanent enslavement of American Indians. These Indian populations were inexperienced in systematic peasant labor and it was therefore not easy to exploit them and although the Indian labor was available, it proved a very expensive undertaking to maintain them. Portugal’s new empire in the New World was also growing very first and her population was too low to provide the necessary labor. This led to no other option than to experiment with African laborers who unlike the Indians who proved difficult to be removed from their land, were very mobile. Due to the need for continuous labor to maintain the plantations, the Portuguese merchants started bringing in African slaves to replace the Indian workforce that was now getting defaced.
The vast growth of the sugar industry created a high demand for the new type of slave labor and Africans gradually increased in number to service this demand. By 1600, Africans had replaced Indians to become the dominant labor force on these plantations and over 500,000 African slaves were brought to this Portuguese colony during the 1600s; a number that was about ten times higher than in the previous century. By 1800, a total of 2.5 million slave laborers had been brought from Africa to Brazil, compared to less than 1 million slaves in the whole of Spanish America combined.
During the 1700s, mining expanded in Brazil creating a new demand for African slave labor. In the period between the 16th and 17th centuries, Latin America’s major mining centers existed in the Peru and Mexican highland silver mines where African labor had not been significant. Gradually however, small but very significant gold deposits were discovered in Central America, Hispaniola, Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela and because of the shortage of labor form the Indian plantations as well as the familiarity of gold mining among many of the West African slaves; African slave labor became an important source of labor in the mines.
Potosi silver production in Peru also created a demand for cheap labor making this place a rich market for African slaves. The unification of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640 also created a conducive atmosphere for Portuguese merchants t supply the Spanish markets in America with slaves. Because the humid and hot rainforest conditions were intolerable for the Indian laborers and Europeans, mine owners relied on work gangs of slaves often under the management of mulatto or free black overseers.
Slave labor also became predominant in many urban occupations ranging from the unskilled to the most highly skilled occupations. They were the prominent source of labor for any large enterprise that was in need of great numbers of laborers stationed in one place such as the manufacturing and construction sectors. Other production sectors such as bakeries and meat drying and salting factories in Brazil and Argentina also relied heavily on African labor. Slaves also worked in other smaller sectors such as furniture making, hat and comb factories, shipyards and glass working factories. For the primary products to be of any use they had to be transported and the African slaves found work as mule drivers in the countryside as well as stevedores and porters in the towns and major cities.
They provided the much needed transport for moving people and goods through streets as well as unloading and loading of cargo from the ships that docked in the ports. Africans also worked as fishermen and sailors on Brazilian coastal vessels or as oarsmen in Colombia where they ferried cargo and passengers in large canoes along the Magdalena River. African slaves provided domestic services and slave servants are said to have outnumbered free servants in the major slave ports of Havana, Bahia, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.
Slaves were imported in large numbers because of the lack of an alternative means of sourcing labor and also because the slave populations’ inability to reproduce themselves. This is because throughout Portuguese and Spanish America, slave deaths exceeded births year after year especially in the plantations where conditions were often brutal and harsh, leading to high infant mortality. There was also a sexual imbalance among the African slaves whereby only about one third of the slaves brought to the New World were women. Most of the slave labor therefore consisted of men. The Atlantic slave traders had also become efficient in their dependability for African slave supply. Prices for slaves were also stable and this made African slave labor attractive to the settlers. The Spaniards also generated enormous wealth from their conquest of the American Heartland and this provided them with capital to import slaves.
Between 1750 and 1780, about 16,000 – 17,000 Africans arrived in Brazil every year with the number rising to 18,000 every year in the 1780s, 23,000 in the 1790s and 24,000 each year in the first decade of the 19th century. The Island of Cuba experienced even a greater increase with the number of slaves rising to 7,000 Africans per year between 1790 and 1810. In the French and British Caribbean colonies, slaves were also imported in great numbers and majority of the inhabitants were slaves. By the 1750s, slave imports to Jamaica surpassed those that went to all other British Caribbean colonies combined. It was followed by the French occupied Island of St. Dominique and by 1791; this Island rivaled Jamaica in the importation of slaves. Jamaica and St. Dominique combined imported approximately 1.6 million slaves in the period between 1701 and 1800. Other British and French Caribbean colonies imported about 1.1 million slaves.
In North America, the situation was a bit different with most of the first slaves being imported from the Caribbean colonies rather than Africa. Another majority of the slaves were born in these New World. By the early 17th century, slaves could be found although in small scale in the New York, New England, New Jersey and New Amsterdam. But the situation changed towards the end of the 17th century when tobacco cultivation became widespread in the Chesapeake region especially Virginia. Planters soon turned to the transatlantic slave trade as a source of slaves. By the 1740s, slaves formed over 40% of the total population in the tobacco growing zones. The North American slave system exhibited some characteristics that were quite unique in that its slave population increased through reproduction while other societies relied entirely on the transatlantic slave trade for their supply of labor.
Before the exportation of slaves to the USA was stopped in 1808, about 360,000 slaves had been imported to the USA, a figure that fell below 4% of all the slaves brought to the Americas. Before the outbreak of the American Civil war in 1860, America’s slave population was about 4 million slaves, over ten times the number of slaves imported from Africa. This contrasted with Brazil’s slave population which constituted approximately four million slaves imported from Africa before slave trade was stopped in the 1850s. This number represented about 40% of the total number of slaves who had crossed the Atlantic and over ten times those that were sent to the United States. Yet according to the Brazilian national census, the slave population had fallen from approximately 1.5 million to about 720,000 by the time slavery was abolished in 1888. By the time slavery was being abolished in the Americas, only the US slave population had expanded beyond the imported number.
Conclusion
Most Africans brought to the New World therefore served as laborers in the production of tropical plantation crops or precious metals. The colonial economy was primarily based on large scale production of essential commodities that would be exported back to Europe. Gradually, these economies expanded and matured, creating a wide variety of productive activities in which African slaves provided the much needed labor alongside the free workers. Initially, African slaves were expensive to acquire but as the economies grew and capital became available, they soon became the most desired source of labor for the development of the new export industries established in the New World.
Works Cited
Andrews, George R. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 12-20.
Bergad, Laird W. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 96-97.
Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 22-31.