North African Slave Trade

Slavery has a long history around the world. In Africa, ancient pharaonic times captives from Nubia were transported to Egypt and across the Sahara to north Africa. Some even were delivered out of Africa to as far as India. In the beginning, slaves were war-captives and were incorporated into the economy and society to strengthen and expand centralized empires while their roles in decentralized nations diminished and not intended for sale. Additionally, slave labor was used in the mid-Saharan salt mines from ancient times; nevertheless, the scale of slave business increased immensely as slave merchants expanded their business across Saharan region and into North Africa. Male slaves in Africa were often incorporated into armies, whereas female

When the Portuguese started developing thriving sugar plantations on the islands of Principe and Sao Tome, they bought slaves from local chiefdoms and imported slave labor directly from the African mainland. Eventually, the Sao Tome plantation system labored by African slaves became the model for plantation slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. In addition, when Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, the European colonizers desperately needed slave labor from Africa to work the gold and silver mines in the American Continent and their tobacco plantations on the Caribbean islands because 90 percent of the Amerindian slaves from the Caribbean islands were wiped out. Also, these African slaves were immune to some diseases, had better experience and skills in metal-working mining and tropical agriculture and had little knowledge of the geography to escape from their owners. From the 1630s, demands for slave labor increased and the scale of the trade in slave captives from West Africa reached its highest point after the French and English were involved in the sugar plantations. The Europeans did not capture these slaves; instead, African rulers provided these slaves mainly captured from warfare among African nations to expand their territories. For example, Benin sold captives to the Portuguese in the late 15th century during their military expansion. Specialist African and Afro-European slave dealers sold them to the Europeans. Not only did the African rulers make a great fortune through the slave trade, the European merchants also profited from the triangular trade, which in turn financed the capitalist factory system of the European industrial revolution.