It hurts me when slavery still exciste in the 21st : 27.02.2010

[Eva Libre]

It hurts me when slavery still exciste in the 21st : 27.02.2010

Slavery was prominent presumably elsewhere in Africa long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade The maritime town of Lagos, Portugal , was the first slave market created in Portugal for the sale of imported African slaves - the Mercado de Escravos, opened in 1444. In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania By the year 1552 black African slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon .In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas - in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil .In the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold . Spain had to fight against relatively powerful and hardy civilizations of the New World . However, the Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas was also facilitated by the spread of diseases (e.g. smallpox ) due to lack of biological immunity. (although diseases such as syphilis were spread to the Europeans from first nations origins.) Natives were used as forced labour (the Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita ), but the diseases caused a labour shortage and so the Spanish colonists were gradually involved in the Atlantic slave trade . The first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World were the Spaniards who labourers on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola , where the alarming decline in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population ( Laws of Burgos, 1512-1513 ). The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. England played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade . The " slave triangle " was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies , and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution . The Transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms, such as the Oyo empire ( Yoruba ), the Ashanti Empire , the kingdom of Dahomey , and the Aro Confederacy .Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods. An estimated 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries.Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States . The white citizens of Virginia decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants .Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries arrived as indentured servants. In 1655, John Casor , a black man, became the first legally recognized slave in the present United States. According to the 1860 U.S. census, 393,975 individuals owned 3,950,528 slaves. The largest number of slaves were shipped to Brazil '
Eva