BLACK SLAVERY: Plantation Slavery in the New World
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I.
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Write these vocabulary words on the Blackboard.
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Slavery
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Spain
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16th century
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Portugal
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domestic
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servant
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plantations
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decades
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II.
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Pull down maps, locate and discuss islands off the Atlantic coast. Point out Spain and Portugal. Then identify North America and Brazil.
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Slavery was legally recognized in Spain and Portugal. Blacks lived in the newly opened territories on the African west coast, and had traditionally been employed as domestic servants. In the sixteenth century plantations were based on slaves, mainly black, in the islands off the Atlantic coast. As a result, slaves, and also the plantation as a enterprise, were transferred to the New World. A long chain of plantations soon covered the Atlantic coastal areas of the New World from North America south to Brazil.
In the nineteenth century, the English were forbidden to engage in slave trading (1807). Because of this slavery faced eventual doom, but was not extinguished for another two decades in Cuba and for thirty-eight years in Brazil. During the 1850’s slavery was abolished in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Slavery began to disappear in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Central America, and Chile (Morner 1967, 124).
