Colonialism and the system of slavery in the Americas (c.1492–1830)

Hernán Cortés, 1519-21, with about 500 soldiers and Tlaxcalan allies, captured Tenochtitlan.

Francisco Pizarro, 1532-33, captured Emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca and seized Cuzco.

A Spanish crown grant giving a colonist the right to demand labour and tribute from a set number of Indigenous people, nominally in exchange for protection.

A rotational forced-labour draft, adapted from an Inca institution, most infamously used to supply workers to the Potosí silver mines.

A system binding Indigenous workers permanently to a Spanish estate, cut off from their home community — closer to hereditary servitude than temporary labour.

The transfer of plants, animals, people and diseases between the Americas and Europe/Africa after 1492 — maize and potatoes went east, horses and disease went west.

Potosí (modern Bolivia) and Zacatecas (Mexico) — Potosí silver funded much of the Spanish empire.

A Dominican friar who campaigned against encomienda abuses; his efforts contributed to the New Laws of 1542, though colonist resistance weakened enforcement.

A colonial racial hierarchy ranking people by ancestry: peninsulares, then criollos, then mestizos, then Indigenous people and enslaved Africans.

An enslaved Indigenous woman who became Cortés's interpreter; historians debate whether she was a powerless victim or an agent who actively shaped events.

Conquest → resource-hunger → forced Indigenous labour (encomienda/mita) → catastrophic population collapse from disease/overwork → colonists turn to enslaved Africans for plantation labour.

Necessity view: no wage market existed, so coercion was practically required, and the crown tried to regulate it (New Laws 1542). Exploitation view: crown limits were routinely ignored and reforms were rolled back under colonist pressure, showing profit dominated.

The forced shipment of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, mainly 1500s–1800s, to work on plantations and in mines.

The brutal sea crossing from West Africa to the Americas; enslaved people were chained below deck for weeks in overcrowded, disease-ridden conditions. Roughly 1 in 8 died on the voyage.

Indigenous populations had collapsed from disease and forced labour; European indentured servants were too few and too costly long-term; Africans were seen (falsely, through racist ideas) as more resistant to tropical disease and already had experience with the crops being grown.

A system where enslaved people are treated as property that can be bought, sold and inherited, with no legal personhood — the form of slavery used in the Americas.

The huge profitability of sugar, tobacco and later cotton — plantation crops needed constant, cheap, large-scale labour, and enslaved labour cost owners far less than paying wages.

European governments passed laws (like Britain's Navigation Acts and slave codes in every colony) that protected the trade, defined enslaved people as property, and gave planters political power in colonial assemblies.

Emerging racist theories claimed Africans were biologically or spiritually inferior, and some used a twisted reading of Christianity to argue slavery could 'civilize' or 'save' enslaved people — ideas invented largely to justify an already-profitable system.

Portugal started the trade earliest (1500s, mainly to Brazil) and shipped the most people overall (~5 million to Brazil); Britain dominated later (1600s–1807), especially to the Caribbean and North America, and became the single largest carrier in the trade's peak century.

The three-legged trade route: European goods to Africa, enslaved Africans to the Americas, plantation goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton) back to Europe.

Enslaved people worked 12–18 hour days in extreme heat, faced whipping and mutilation as discipline, lived in cramped huts, and had short life expectancies — especially on Caribbean sugar plantations, among the deadliest workplaces in history.

Enslaved women faced forced field labour PLUS domestic work PLUS constant sexual violence from owners, and their children were automatically born enslaved — meaning women's bodies were also directly exploited for the reproduction of the enslaved workforce.

Indigenous peoples were displaced from land now worked by enslaved Africans, and over generations complex multiracial societies emerged (mixing African, Indigenous and European people), while Indigenous communities themselves continued to suffer from disease and land loss.

Constant, low-risk acts by enslaved people such as working slowly, feigning illness, or breaking tools to reduce their enslavers' profit.

A settlement founded by escaped enslaved people, often in remote forests, mountains or swamps, beyond colonial control.

Vodou in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) blended African spiritual traditions with Catholic imagery, letting enslaved people preserve their beliefs and community identity under the guise of conformity.

A Vodou ceremony traditionally linked to the start of the massive uprising that triggered the Haitian Revolution.

An uprising in South Carolina led by an enslaved man named Jemmy; around 20 enslaved people seized weapons and killed several planters before being defeated, leading colonies to tighten slave codes.

It was the only slave rebellion in history to succeed in creating a fully independent state, ending both slavery and French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue.

It survived through most of the 17th century in Brazil, led for a time by Zumbi, before Portuguese forces destroyed it in 1694.

They were among the first religious groups to formally oppose slavery, banning their own members from owning enslaved people by the 1770s.

A formerly enslaved man whose 1789 autobiography gave first-hand testimony of enslavement and the Middle Passage, strengthening the abolitionist case with direct evidence.

The printing press allowed pamphlets, books and images — such as the 1788 diagram of the slave ship Brookes — to be mass-produced and reach wide audiences across Britain and its colonies.

Resistance (sabotage, rebellion, escape) directly and immediately challenged slavery in practice, sometimes ending it locally (Haiti); abolitionism (religious groups, ideas, testimony, print) built the slower but wider legal and moral case that eventually ended slavery across whole empires.

The brutal Atlantic Ocean crossing used to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas.