Page 132 - Transcriptions d'actes notariés - Tome 20 - 1682-1686

Some Opinions of Christian Europeans
Regarding Negro Slavery in the Seventeenth
and Early Eighteenth Centuries

John K. A. FARRELL, h.I.A., PhB., F.R.C.S., F.R.S.A.

To explore the men~ality of a hygone age is perhaps the iriost
difficult taçk of the social historiari. The challenge, however, to peer
into the minds and motives 01 previous nenerations seeking a key to
their institutions and actions eari scarcely be resisted by ~he incurahly
curious.
Alttiough the past iorty-four years have seen violence and bloodshed
on a vast ficale whieh grows with each eonflict, and have witneseed the
ghastly annihilation of human beings in rnillions, sonie of ns nurtured in
an older, rnore delicate tradition are still appalled and intrigned by
historical systerns which inflicted a loss uf liberty and mueh misery on
fellow human beings. Such an inditution was Negro slavery developed
and sustained by European powers in their llother Countries and in their
overseas Empires [rom the fifteenth century on into the nineteen~h. We
have beeome reluctantly accuslomed in this first half of the twentieth
eentnry 10 the enslavement of entire populations of Enropeans by
Europeans, or of Asiaties snch as the Chinese by tyrants of their own
race, as the totalitarian state rises and advances wiih deadly snccess.
Horrihle as this fate is, it, at least, follows with some logic irom
the atheistie materialism animatiiio the totalitarian state. We are faced
c-.
wit1i a iar greater pnzzle when we realize that the Enropean nations who
seized npon the sysieni of Negro davery in the fifteenth and sixleenth
centuries as a rneans to develop their overseas pussessions were out-
spokenly Ctiristian. Portugal, the first of these powers to utilise the
system, juined with Castile and Aragon through the Middle Ages, and,
especially, in the fiiteenth cenlury, as the great charnpion of Caiholici-sm
acrainst the Mosleni invaders uf the Iherian ueninsnla. S~ain. whose
...
L- 1 '
Empire was long the best cuslnnier uf the Porlu~uese slave-trade, regarded
the canse of Catholicism as synonymous wiih its own ambitions. The
Netherlands, which by thc latter half uf thc sixteenth centnry, was
challenging Portugal's nionopoly on the West African slave-trade, had
Iargely changed irorn its traditional Catholicism to Calvin's creed, bnt,
nonetheless, considcred itself dynamically Christian. England by the
seventeenth century had arvakened sufficiently to the rich rewards of the
West African slave-trade to benin a protracted dnel with the Ncther-
lands over prisses~ion of the Guinea trade. And like hcr opponent, stic
was a etalinch defender of a Protestant version 01 the Christian Faith.
A eornplica~ing factor in England's religious picture in ttie 1660'8, wtien