Portuguese Atlantic Slavery System
First mover in industrialized human trafficking
Portugal opened large-scale Atlantic slave trading in the fifteenth century and then shared the circuit with every other European maritime power. Roughly 12.5 million Africans were shipped into plantation death regimes that capitalized Iberian, Dutch, British, French, and Nordic merchant houses.
Damage
Early Atlantic slavery architecture shipped African captives into plantation death regimes.
Lives lost
Hundreds of thousands trafficked in Portuguese circuits; higher mortality on voyages and plantations
Value lost
Sugar, gold, and slave-trade profits compounding Lisbon and Brazilian colonial capital
Record Points
- Portuguese trading forts on the West African coast standardized the capture-to-ship logistics later copied by rivals.
- Portuguese and Brazilian ships alone carried close to half of all Africans transported across the Atlantic.
- Brazilian sugar and later coffee depended on a continuous flow of imported forced labor to replace those worked to death.
- Amsterdam, Liverpool, Nantes, and Copenhagen scaled the trade into a pan-European industry.
- Abolition dates arrived long after the accumulated capital had already been laundered into legitimate national wealth.
Perpetrator(s)
Victims
West AfricaBrazilAngola