Yesterday the world ignored the 500th Anniversary of the Atlantic slave trade

[malaise]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/transatlantic-slave-trade-voyages-ships-log-details-africa-america-atlantic-ocean-deaths-disease-a8494546.html
<snip>

Almost completely ignored by the modern world, this month marks the 500th anniversary of one of history’s most tragic and significant events – the birth of the Africa to America transatlantic slave trade. New discoveries are now revealing the details of the trade’s first horrific voyages.

Exactly five centuries ago – on 18 August 1518 (28 August 1518, if they had been using our modern Gregorian calendar) – the King of Spain, Charles I, issued a charter authorising the transportation of slaves direct from Africa to the Americas. Up until that point (since at least 1510), African slaves had usually been transported to Spain or Portugal and had then been transhipped to the Caribbean.

Charles’s decision to create a direct, more economically viable Africa to America slave trade fundamentally changed the nature and scale of this terrible human trafficking industry. Over the subsequent 350 years, at least 10.7 million black Africans were transported between the two continents. A further 1.8 million died en route.

This month’s quincentenary is of a tragic event that caused untold suffering and still today leaves a legacy of poverty, racism, inequality and elite wealth across four continents. But it also quite literally changed the world and still geopolitically, socially, economically and culturally continues to shape it even today – and yet the anniversary has been almost completely ignored.

[MLAA]

1. Thank you for calling attention to this awful tipping point in history.

I will reflect on it and the millions of lives it impacted/shattered and all the pain and torture it allowed to grow exponentially.

[StevieM]

14. It affects us to this day. (eom)

[heaven05]

2. thank you

for continuing my knowledge and for timely reminders

[HipChick]

3. Thanks for posting..

[guillaumeb]

4. Recommended.

Inconvenient truth must generally be ignored, or dismissed as an aberration even when the behavior is endlessly repeated.


And history is generally written by the 1% to present themselves in the best way.


In the US, people are still dealing with, or ignoring, the ramifications of living in a country built by slaves.

[TuxedoKat]

5. I've seen alot of this

especially with schools. It's pitiable. With my kids I'd often ask them, "Did they mention the 30th, 40th, 50th, etc., anniversary of such in such in school today or this week?" Almost always my kids said no mention was made.

[Staph]

6. Only 26 years after Columbus' first voyage....

Man's inhumanity to man is a frightening thing.

[RobinA]

7. For What Reason

did Charles want slaves in the Americas in 1518? I’m guessing they were going in South or Central America?

[appalachiablue]

8. Labor for farming & building 'civilization' in the New World, churches, forts, etc.

The Telegraph: "But this African catastrophe was linked to another terrible human disaster on the American side of the Atlantic, the sheer scale of which is only now being revealed by archaeology.
For the main reason that the Europeans needed African slaves to be shipped to the Caribbean was because the early Spanish colonisation of that region had led to the deaths of up to three million local Caribbean Indians, many of whom the Spanish had already de facto enslaved and had intended to be their local workforce."

The Caribbean Indians had been decimated from maltreatment by Europeans, disease imported from the Old World which they had no resistance to, famine, desertion and more. The Spanish needed a new hardy workforce.

[zentrum]

9. Thank you Malaise.

[niyad]

10. thank you for this important reminder.

[tclambert]

11. People were abducted from their homes by force, chained up, shipped across an ocean

to lands they didn't know existed, and forced into slave labor. And that wasn't a crime, it was a successful business model.

[malaise]

12. Ask the Chambers of Commerce

[StevieM]

13. If Hillary was in the White House she would have acknowledged this terrible anniversary

and what it represented for humanity.

[SallyHemmings]

15. Thank you