African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean Quotes

“extensive history of Europeans enslaving each other would suggest that there was nothing special about the Africans and slavery in the European mind at the end of the 15th century. Finally, it was not any special need for such Africans within the European economy that was the driving force behind the purchase of enslaved Africans on the Atlantic African coast. It was without question American labor market conditions that most influenced the growth of the Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, the choice of Africans had much to do with their availability and price as opposed to the nonavailability of”
― Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean

“Until the 1830s more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually and as late as 1750 some 4.5 million of the estimated 6.6 million people who had come to the Americas since 1492 were African slaves.”
― Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean

“These changes occurred just as the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and the Portuguese settlement of the Brazilian subcontinent was getting under way and thus opened the American market for African slaves. The decimation of the native Arawak and Carib peoples in the Caribbean islands, the first major zone of European settlement, especially encouraged the early experimentation with African slave labor.”
― Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean

“The arrival of the Portuguese explorers and traders on the sub-Saharan African coast in the early 1400s would ultimately represent a major new development in the history of the slave trade in Africa in terms of the intensity of its development, the sources of its slaves, and the uses to which its slaves would be put. But initially there was little to distinguish the Portuguese traders from the Muslim traders of North Africa and the sub-Saharan regions.”
― Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean