US History Mystery solved! Origins of the first slaves in the colonies! :)

[Verbose]

i just dont like ppl demonizing whites for slavery.

the fact of it is, its OTHER blacks that first cepured them and made them slaves. even if ther was No white ppl, the blacks whould still be slaves.
i allways hear of black ppl talking about how the "White man" came to thear peacfull and peace loveing village, and burned it down, raped the weaman, killed the elderly, and took the healthy for slaves. it wasnt white ppl, it was ur OWN ppl.
so y is the blame seemingly place entierly on us
i just dont like it..
same for native americans.. ppl have an image of peace loveing, natives that know how to make postions out of stuff u pic up along a trail, and are all good at animal tracking..
well hate to burst ur bubble ppl, but the natives defintly weart as peaceloveing as ppl think! not to say the whites whearnt eather.

That's for Americans to sort out between themselves.

It's plain as day the slave trade had a huge impact on Africa. There's a term for the kind of states it produced: "Gunpowder empires".

Europeans find a local client king, arm him to the teeth with muskets in exchange for slaves from his neighbours with which he's at war.

He would be at war and slaves would be captured regardless, but now the scale and intensity of it all just got upped by the ump-teenth degree.

 

[Verbose]

You meant to quote someone else didn't you?

Um... actually no.

But it was perhaps incomplete.

Sometimes "historical significance" just amounts to trying to get the book-keeping straight. It's a bit of that I suppose.

Looking for some more... significant... historical significance, the deal is rather this:

No one used to give a rats ass who the slaves were. Nothing interesting was assumed to be possible to know about Africans. One African was just a blue print of another African.
Heck, Leopold von Ranke, "the father of modern history", even defined History in such a fashion that he allowed himself to exclude the Africans after a priori defining them as having no history. Very convenient for old Leo, but hardly correct.

So the significance is that no one cared who the slaves were once. Now people do. Enough to go and do the leg-work necessary to come up with the info that these people came from Angola. That could have been done anytime before, had someone actually cared.

So something has definately changed here. That's historically significant.

 

[Gelion]

Um... actually no.

But it was perhaps incomplete.

Sometimes "historical significance" just amounts to trying to get the book-keeping straight. It's a bit of that I suppose.

Looking for some more... significant... historical significance, the deal is rather this:

No one used to give a rats ass who the slaves were. Nothing interesting was assumed to be possible to know about Africans. One African was just a blue print of another African.
Heck, Leopold von Ranke, "the father of modern history", even defined History in such a fashion that he allowed himself to exclude the Africans after a priori defining them as having no history. Very convenient for old Leo, but hardly correct.

So the significance is that no one cared who the slaves were once. Now people do. Enough to go and do the leg-work necessary to come up with the info that these people came from Angola. That could have been done anytime before, had someone actually cared.

So something has definately changed here. That's historically significant.

Thanks! And it does make sence

 

[jonatas]

Yep, I don't know why some people go looking for an easy and simplistic moral/ideological conclusion they can draw on a subject they care to know little about either. Actually I think it's ignorance.

A couple things bout the topic: the article mentions Portugal under Spanish direction (Portugal falls under Spanish dominion from late 1570's to 1640's due to Dom Sebastiao's spectacular demise in a Morrocan crusade). However the Portuguese empire was still largely administrated separately from Spanish America during this period.

It doesn't surprise me at all that the slaves came from Angola. The transatlantic slave trade really starts to kick off in the latter half of the 1500's precisely from Angola. The greatest single destination in the Americas was Salvador, Bahia in Brazil, which would become the first great capital in the Portuguese colony and really was probably one of the (if not the) greatest cities in the Americas during this period. We know many of the slaves came here from Angola.

 

[Louis XXIV]

This is actually quite interesting to me. Verbose brings up a great point as well about including African history (and making a genuine effort to do so, not an off-hand comment). Slaves were a class of Americans who share the same history as everyone else from a different perspective. Its much better to think of it this way, rather than just say that the people we talk about in history owned slaves. Figuring out their origins (just like we know the origins of Jamestown colony) is important to American history.