The institution of slavery was a traditional element in African kingdoms and chiefdoms.  Captives were usually acquired through war or as for payment of debts and enslaved for a period of time or even for life. However, enslaved captives often gained positions in the societies that had captured them and their children were generally born free. African traders were willing to include this human cargo in commerce with the Portuguese and other Europeans, who readily accepted them as enslaved workers and domestic servants. ![[Guilherme_Piso_engenho_1648.jpg]] _A Portuguese sugar mill, worked by African slaves, 1648_ The trade of enslaved people, especially from eastern Europe, had been important in many parts of Europe even into the 1400s. We have seen that in the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries were eastern European captives who were trained as an elite military corps. The thriving mercantile economies of all of Islamic empires from Spain to Persia also created a demand for enslaved people from Europe. The Vikings of northern Europe sold captives from Britain to the Middle East, as did medieval Frankish kings of western and central Europe, who enslaved prisoners-of-war from the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe (as had the Romans before them). Although the demand for enslaved labor was less in Europe than in the more economically-developed Muslim world, some European slaves served owners in the fiefdoms of the western Europe. The human cargo taken from Africa by the Portuguese in the 1400s, however, became much more highly favored than slaves from eastern Europe: not only were dark-skinned people considered more exotic for service in royal courts, they also could not easily escape by blending in with the local population. It's easy to imagine how this visible difference could lead to ideas of superior and inferior races. Within a few generations, many slave-owning “whites” would consider “blacks” to be only suited for enslavement. ![[bbxs4xJDnXEAb3g5eWGEQA-650-80.jpg.webp]] *Ruins of an early Portuguese sugar plantation on São Tomé, off the African coast* However, what made the African slave trade so lucrative by the 1500s and into the beginning of the 1800s was not the demand for labor in Europe, but on sugar plantations on the islands of the African coast and later in Brazil and the Caribbean. The vast majority of the enslaved from Africa were used as forced labor in the cultivation and processing of sugar cane. Portuguese trade with sub-Saharan Africa coincided with the discovery that sugar cane grew well on the eastern Atlantic islands off the African coast colonized by the Portuguese and Spanish in the 1400s. ----- Next: [[3.18 - Sugar]] Back: [[3.16 - Africa]]