The Desire returns to Massachusetts with captive Africans

Sublimis Deus declared Indigenous peoples rational and capable of Christian faith and condemned their enslavement. Its protection was limited and repeatedly undermined by colonial practice, and it did...

The New Laws sought to curb abuses against Indigenous peoples and restrict hereditary encomiendas, while also addressing Indigenous enslavement. Colonial elites resisted and enforcement was uneven....

The Crown granted Reynel a contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. The asiento system made trafficking a regulated imperial monopoly, with African captives treated as taxable cargo...

A privateer delivered captive Africans to Point Comfort in August 1619, where colonists exchanged food for them. This often-cited arrival is not the beginning of African presence in the Americas,...

The charter authorized a Dutch company to wage war, trade, and govern in Atlantic territories. Its later activities included conquest, plantation production, and trafficking in enslaved Africans,...

The legal code permitted enslavement of captives taken in just wars and people sold into bondage by others. Its language shows colonial lawmakers creating legal openings for enslavement while claiming...

Eleven Black residents petitioned for freedom for themselves and their families, citing decades of service and asking for land. The Dutch authorities granted conditional freedom while keeping their...

The assembly passed a law that purported to limit service to ten years or age twenty-four. The law was weakly enforced and the colony continued slave trading and slaveholding. The gap between...

The English conquest brought Jamaica into an expanding plantation empire. Enslaved Africans and Indigenous people were forced into labor under changing imperial rulers, while Spanish-speaking and...

Barbados enacted a law for the “better ordering and governing” of enslaved Africans. It made racialized hereditary slavery a state-enforced institution, restricted movement and testimony, and...