Developing a new market

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Spanish settlers on the Caribbean Islands had

decided they needed a new source of labor. The local Indians, whom they enslaved,

had no immunity to diseases from Europe. Many were sick or weak, and too many

died.

The Spaniards began importing African slaves, who were less likely to keel over from

smallpox. (Smallpox — one of the deadliest diseases among Europeans and far more

deadly to Caribbean Indians — was also widespread in Africa, so African slaves carried

natural resistance.) The first African slaves were purchased from Portuguese ships

around 1530, beginning a trade that escalated sharply through the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries and peaked in the eighteenth century.

Also in the sixteenth century, the Spanish found that slave labor made cash crops such

as sugar, which they could grow on Hispaniola and other Caribbean Islands, highly

profitable. And so they bought more slaves. By 1700, 4,000 slaves arrived in the

Spanish-ruled islands every year.

The English, who were building their first permanent settlement in North America at

Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, didn’t wait long to begin importing slaves. The English

also had a labor-intensive, profitable crop — tobacco. In 1619, Virginia began using

African slaves in tobacco fields.

Portugal brought slaves to Brazil in such numbers that by 1800, half the population of

that big country was of African heritage.

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