Blog 5: Portugese Empire & Slave Trade

It was interesting to learn about the Portuguese Empire of Commerce, where the learned that the merchandise ships through the Indian Ocean were not heavily armed and lacked support of weapons and security, which the Portuguese ships had. This gave them the opportunity to take advantage of no power dominating the seas to outmaneuver naval forces since their cannons would crush coastal fortifications. The Portuguese created the “trading post empire” in the Indian Ocean, leading them to ask merchants for a pass to pay duties of up to ten percent, blocking the Red Sea route to the Mediterranean. Although they thought they were going to conquer most of the trade like in the European, they never succeeded in controlling them.

Reading about the Atlantic Slave trade was very informative, where slaves were being transported all over the country just as merchandise or products. Slave trade definitely enriched Europeans and Euro American. Something that interested me was that there were different types of slaves. In my mind I think of what I was taught about Slavery here in the U.S. but in this era some of the slaves where actually able to become apart of the community they were taken to, while others were apart of the prominent military or even gain political status. The slavery that was very different was the one in the Americas, where slaves where dehumanize and lost all their rights as human beings, seen as nothing more than property. The graphs in the readings were really helpful which showed the rise of slaves starting in the 1500’s and the rapid declination of slaves in 1851. Another graph shows that Brazil was the place with the highest disembarked slaves and the Caribbean’s right after them. There was a lot of things happening during this time period and its just fascinating to keep learning about all the things I wasn’t aware of and how the things that were done many years ago reflect where we are now.