Slavery in The Spanish New World Colonies

Slavery In The Spanish New World Colonies

Slavery in the Spanish colonies began with settlers' enslaving the local indigenous peoples in the Antilles. The Spanish colonists used slavery and production quotas to force the local labor to bring a return on the expedition and colonization investments. During the first decades of the colonization, the widespread and abusive slavery cost many thousands of lives of indigenous peoples, who died from forced labor in crop fields and searching for gold. After decades of pressure, primarily from priests and friars who argued that slavery was incompatible with Christianity, the Council of the Indies, mandated to protect the native people by the Laws of the Indies, stopped the encomienda system and the enforced slavery of the natives. Together with high fatalities from infectious diseases brought from Europe, the native population died in great number in a matter of decades, depopulating the West Indies. The changes did not stop forced labor in the Spanish colonies on the mainland, which took on a new guise under the repartimiento.

In addition, in the West Indies, the colonists needed a new source of labor and began to import African slaves, joining the transatlantic slave trade. Spain was a customer of Dutch and British slave traders; it generally did not deal directly with personnel in Africa. It ended both Indian and African slavery in the mainland of the Americas in the eighteenth century, but in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where sugar cane production was highly profitable based on slave labor, African slavery was abolished in 1866 and 1873, respectively.