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Portuguese visitors so often engaged in slavery in Japan and occasionally South Asian and African crew members were taken to Macau and other Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas, [31] and India, where there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders in Goa by the early 17th century, many of whom became prostitutes. [32]
The first expedition that purchased slaves seems to have been one in 1441 commanded by Nuno Tristão, which went to the area known by the Portuguese as Rio do Ouro in Western Sahara, where one of the captains, Antão Gonçalves, discovered that Africa already had an internal slave trade and bought slaves on his own initiative, returning to ...
This slave trade also involved local black merchants and warriors who profited from the trade. [13] In the 17th century, the Imbangala became the main rivals of the Mbundu in supplying slaves to the Luanda market. In the 1750s the Portuguese sold 5,000 to 10,000 slaves annually, devastating the Mbundu economy and population. [14]
From these bases, the Portuguese engaged profitably in the slave and gold trades. Portugal enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade for over a century, exporting around 800 slaves annually. Most were brought to the Portuguese capital Lisbon, where it is estimated black Africans came to constitute 10 percent of the population. [24]
The various epidemics that, from 1560, decimated the Indian slaves at an alarming rate, caused that the Portuguese Crown to create laws that prohibit, partially, the slavery of Indians, that is, "forbade the enslavement of converted Indians and only allowed the capture of slaves only through war against the Indians that they fight or devour the ...
Ancient slave market in Lagos. Although there may have been people of Black African descent living in Portugal since the Antiquity, they started arriving in significant numbers only after the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and, more significantly, after the creation of the Portuguese Empire.
From the 16th to 19th centuries the Portuguese and their merchants were just one among many rival groups competing for the local trade in gold, ivory, and slaves. Even if the Portuguese hold on these three African regions was tenuous, they clearly remained the main European presence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Initially, the Portuguese attempted to utilize Indian slaves for sugar cultivation, but shifted to the use of black African slave labor. [24] While the availability of Amerindians did decrease due to epidemics afflicting the coastal native population and the declaration of king Sebastian I 's 1570 law which proclaimed the liberty of Brazilian ...