A Grim Anniversary

This week marks the 500th anniversary of Spain allowing and creating a business monopoly on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, directly from the African coast to the Caribbean.

August 1518 was just 26 years after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola. This article by the Independent includes details on primary source research, the revelation (to me) that Spain and Portugal had already been importing enslaved people to their countries — rather than their colonies — for over 70 years at this point, and also this fact I needed to be reminded of:

this African catastrophe was linked to another terrible human disaster on the American side of the Atlantic, the sheer scale of which is only now being revealed by archaeology. For the main reason that the Europeans needed African slaves to be shipped to the Caribbean was because the early Spanish colonisation of that region had led to the deaths of up to three million local Caribbean Indians, many of whom the Spanish had already de facto enslaved and had intended to be their local workforce.

Specifically, the estimated 2 million people of Hispaniola in 1492 had been reduced to just 26,000 by 1514. As Columbus wrote in his journal, "With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. Here there are so many of these slaves." But darn, those people kept dying (from disease or violence), so his successors had to come up more people to exploit.