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The African Slave Trade[39]

For almost one hundred years beginning after 1648 Curaçao was an important Caribbean transshipment center for enslaved Africans. Although the slave trade was highly lucrative for local merchants, especially those who were affiliated with the WIC, even during the height of its involvement Curaçao only received a fraction of the total number of slaves who were brought to the Americas. It is estimated that some 100,000 enslaved Africans arrived on the island between 1675 and 1775;[40] by comparison, a total of almost ten million Africans were shipped into slavery during the four centuries between 1451 and 1870, eighty percent of them between 1701 and 1850 and six million in the "golden age" between 1701 and 1810.[41] Curaçao's role in this traffic peaked in the second half of the seventeenth century and declined significantly thereafter.

The Portuguese began capturing slaves on the western coast of Africa as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, operating from small fortified settlements and paying coastal tribes to venture inland to capture enemy prisoners. Once the plantation economies of the Americans became well established in the seventeenth century, major European powers battled to wrest control of these slaving depots from the Portuguese, a struggle that was to last for over a century. Eventually the British won the European competition in Africa and came to dominate the slave trade, just as they eventually won the greatest spoils in the Caribbean, but not before the Dutch were to play an important, if relatively brief, role.

Spain controlled the distribution of slaves in its American colonies through the asiento, a delivery contract which the Spanish King granted to individuals or companies for the right to provide slaves in exchange for payment of duties. The asiento was a kind of early corporate agreement between the Crown and the private sector; later the term was used to mean the agency that actually supplied slaves, regardless of who held the contract. Spain formally introduced the asiento system as early as 1595 to more closely regulate trade with its colonies and prevent contraband. Asiento contracts were highly coveted and were awarded to different entities of different nationalities over the years. Their terms were usually quite detailed, specifying a fixed number of marketable humans to be delivered within a certain time period; when these conditions could not be met "interlopers from various nations often filled the breach."[42] An independent slave trade thus soon developed alongside the regulated trade.

With the development of the plantation economy in the Americas, slaves became a key commodity in the so-called triangular trade across the Atlantic. Large galleons carried highly desirable European products such as textiles, cigarettes, tools and arms from Liverpool, Amsterdam and other bustling ports to Guinea and Angola, where they exchanged their cargos for captured Africans. These human commodities were, in turn, transported to the Caribbean and the Americas where they were sold to work the plantations; the ships then loaded up on valuable cash crops like sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton, which were produced by the slave labor, and returned to Europe. The cash crops were made into highly marketable products for export, and the cycle began anew. Every element and stop in this sequence was highly dependent on the others.

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Curaçao Chamber of Commerce & Industry