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Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
In Spanish American cities, captives were skilled artisans and shopkeepers, and they offered domestic services in the homes of Spanish elites. Captives often challenged their enslavement throughout Spanish America. Some enslaved men and women challenged enslavers in the colonial courts.
Once slavery was established there, the slave trade – which Columbus had already initiated – developed quickly with Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and French ships transporting enslaved natives to various points and Spanish colonists enslaving those who remained.
Amerindian Slavery and Coerced Labor. Soon after his famous 1492 voyage, with the backing of the Spanish Crown and over one thousand Spanish colonists, Genoese merchant Christopher Columbus established the first European colony in the Americas on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Two-thirds of the more than two million enslaved Africans arriving in the Spanish Americas disembarked before 1810—prior to the era of large-scale sugar cultivation in Cuba and Puerto Rico—which necessitates a reconsideration of the real significance of slavery in Spain's American colonies.
This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations.
Article 17. 2015. Free and Not so Much: Black Slavery in the Spanish Colonial World. Taylor Ritz. University of Nebraska at Kearney. Follow this and additional works at: htps://openspaces.unk.edu/undergraduate-research-journal. Part of the Latin American History Commons. Recommended Citation.
