Slavery (Vicuña of the East)

Slavery is the treatment of people as property and forcing them to work. The practice has existed for thousands of years and existed on a worldwide scale by around the 1650s.

African Slave Trade
Slavery of Africans was the most common form of slavery. Early slave traders were the Portuguese and Spanish, who imported Moors and Africans across the Sahara for manual labour in places such as the Canary Islands. The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of Guinea were the Portuguese; the first European to actually buy African slaves in the region of Guinea was Antão Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer in 1441 AD. To cultivate the sugar the Portuguese turned to large numbers of African slaves. Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast, originally built by African labor for the Portuguese in 1482 to control the gold trade, became an important depot for slaves that were to be transported to the New World.

The Spanish were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, where the alarming death rate in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population. The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501 soon after the Papal Bull of 1493 gave all of the New World to Spain. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery. These papal bulls came to serve as a justification for the subsequent era of slave trade. The followers of the church of England and Protestants did not use the papal bulls as a justification for their involvement in slavery.