Origins of Slavery

Origins of Slavery

To begin your further comprehension on slavery, I'd like to begin by going into a bit of the history of slavery. This practice existed many years prior to European exploration - even the Aztecs had their own 'slaves'. However, these people did have human rights. They could buy their freedom, or if they managed to escape from their masters, they were granted it. It was used as a measure to pay debts, as another option than imprisonment... but European imperialism changed this.

Origins

To begin, I'd like to point out that I'm not bashing the Europeans, and it's important to understand their point of view. Slavery began in a time where Europeans genuinely thought it was okay to enslave people from other cultures and treat them the way they did, because they considered Indigenous people to be uncivilized - they were ethnocentric.

When the Spanish conquistadors entered the Americas, they first decided the Indigenous people were below them, and they killed the majority of them with their diseases, strategies and weapons. This granted them a massive amount of land, and they began to enslave the people who were left. They needed workers.
Indigenous people had natural resistance against diseases found in the tropics, and so they were made to work on the plantations. As more colonies developed, the demand for slave labor (which was cheap and easily accessible as time went on) began to increase - and to make a massive profit, European powers would force slaves to work for little to no money under horrible conditions. A slave wasn't worth much, and wasn't regarded as a human being, but as a product.

A Spanish priest called Las Casas begged the Spanish rulers to treat people from the Americas better, and suggested African slaves instead - something which he regretted greatly later on. Africans were taken from their countries - men, women and children alike - and the continent was depopulated at an alarmingly fast rate. They were abused and beaten if they didn't obey their masters, and thousands of people died.
They were now trapped in chattel slavery; if the slave had a child, for example, the child would also be 'property' of their master.

An important part of the slave trade was the Middle Passage and the Triangular Trade. These two elements belong to the same trading route that Europeans used to transport sugar, cocoa and so forth back to Europe, metal, cloth, beads and guns to Africa - and slaves to the plantations in South America or to Europe as well. This was the Triangular Trade. The Middle Passage was the one leg of the 'triangle' notorious for transporting slaves.
The journey was harrowing, and slaves were packed closely together on boats. In order for the European sailors to make a profit, they would have to keep the slaves alive, but disease still ran rampant. The conditions were extremely bad. At least 1.28 million African slaves died in these five to eight month journeys.