Economics of Slavery in the New World

Slavery: the word stands for everything that went wrong with the colonization of the Americas. African slaves arrived in the New World less than a decade after Christopher Columbus, but they were not the first slaves the European conquerors brought into the equation: Indio natives of the Caribbean islands the Spaniards "discovered" had already been enslaved - and brought back to the royal court of Castile to be paraded about as the prizes of exploration. Even white slaves made their appearance in the early years of colonization. Slavery: the Americas, North and South, were built upon a complex structure of economic, political and social relationships that included slavery as an integral part of its workings.

Slavery, of course, was not an innovation brought on by the discovery of the New World; the ancients had relied upon slave populations to build their civilizations and, following that tradition, the just-ended medieval European society had never excluded captured Saracens from the defilements of slavery (and vice versa). Though never popular in the northern countries of Europe, slavery had continued to maintain a foothold in the economic life of the Mediterranean principalities, particularly as galley slaves for the Spanish, Portuguese and Ottoman navies - and in the sugar plantations of Cyprus, Crete, Sicily and Palestine that had developed since the Crusades in response to a growing European demand. The basis of selection for such slavery was not race, as it c

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point on we will concentrate upon the example of English Virginia and Spanish Cuba. As the 18th Century drew to a close, the institution of slavery in both the Virginian and Cuban colonies resembled one another in general outlines. With the exception of a few large-scale plantations, the average slaveholder owned few slaves, worked with them on small farms, and, population-wise, outnumbered the slave population by a comfortably large ratio. (It should be noted that, even in the heyday of the slave trade to come in later years, the master-slave ratio in both regions topped at 70%/30%. ) Slavery was largely an agrarian institution. In addition to the overall reasons for the decline of slavery described previously, the institution was frittering away in Virginia for lack of a reason to utilize it. Tobacco, the only cash crop justifying intensive slave labor, was a nutrient-sucking plant, decimating the land; every year the tobacco grower experienced lower and lower yields. Similarly in Cuba, the large-scale sugar production requiring labor-heavy slave participation had waned. Official Spanish interest in the island's economy had long since wandered further west to Mexico and South America; Cuba's slow economic decline had b

Category: History - E