• DOI:10.1080/14788810.2017.1315514
• Corpus ID: 218620874

From Africa to the Ocean Sea: Atlantic slavery in the origins of the Spanish Empire

@article{BerquistSoule2018FromAT,
  title={From Africa to the Ocean Sea: Atlantic slavery in the origins of the Spanish Empire},
  author={Emily Berquist Soule},
  journal={Atlantic Studies},
  year={2018},
  volume={15},
  pages={16 - 39}
}

• Emily Berquist Soule
• Published 2 January 2018
• History
• Atlantic Studies

ABSTRACT Through examining the complex relationship of conquest, Catholicism, and enslavement that defined Iberian expansion into the Atlantic world, this article shows how slavery and the slave trade stood at the center of the foundation of the Spanish Empire. It traces Spanish conquest, settlement, and trade in the Canary Islands, Africa, and the Caribbean in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It demonstrates how even though by the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese would adopt distinct roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, prior to settlement on the American mainland, their shared cultural, religious, and ideological background resulted in many similarities. The article begins in the Canary Islands, where the Spanish first enslaved newly encountered foreign peoples. There, the Castilian monarchs and the Catholic Church collaborated to develop a frighteningly effective logic of overseas colonization and enslavement based on religion and geography – not protean conceptions of “race.” From the Canaries, the Spanish followed the Portuguese to Africa, where they would become eager, if ill-fated, participants in the fifteenth-century rush for gold and slaves. At the same time, Iberian notions linking black skin and perpetual servitude began to crystallize. Soon thereafter, an idealized vision of Portuguese profits from the slave trade inspired Columbus to imagine how the Spanish, boxed out of Africa south of the Sahara by papal treaties and international accords, could create an alternate version of this complex with indigenous slaves in America. By 1500, Ferdinand and Isabella would begin to attack the trade in Amerindian slaves, thereby establishing an essential distinction between the two groups of “others” who resided on the bottom of the colonial Spanish scale of humanity. The Catholic Church’s variant position on indigenous Americans and black Africans first helped to create and then mirrored this separation between Amerindian vassals and black slaves, setting the stage for almost four more centuries of African slavery in Spain’s Atlantic empire.