Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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First-ever slavery plantation is discovered in Africa:
Ruins of a nearly 500-year-old sugar mill and estate located on a tiny island to the west
Plantation slavery roots are traced back to a tiny island in Africa
The 16th-century ruins of a sugar mill and estate found on a small West African island are deemed the oldest slavery plantation. Experts said the system was then adopted in the Americas.
www.dailymail.co.uk
- The ruins of a sugar mill and estate found in Africa are the earliest plantation
- The site was operating in the 1530s - about 100 years before slavery in the US
The island, named São Tomé, was the largest sugar producer globally in the 1530s, creating the blueprint for plantation economies across the Atlantic Ocean.
The ruins of the mill and estate were uncovered by researchers from the University of Cologne, who said the structure's scale reflects the large enslaved labor force who worked in the main room where sugar was boiled.
The Portuguese settled São Tomé in 1470 and became the largest sugar producer by the 1530s due to enslaved Africans from the Slave Coast of West Africa, the Niger Delta, the island of Fernando Po, and later from the Kongo and Angola.
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The mill operated for about 400 years, but when slavery traveled across the Atlantic, it took the sugar business with it.
The island's prominence faded before the beginning of the seventeenth century due to the poor quality of its sugar, the rise of Brazilian production, and extensive slave insurrections.
Political instability and the destruction of mills led major landowners to move to Brazil.
The European population on the island dwindled, while the Creole elite and free Black people strengthened their political and social power, controlling landownership and trade, namely in human beings destined for Brazilian and Caribbean plantations
Commentary:
Yet another fascinating article! I'd never heard of this country before. São Tomé was at the core of the Islamic-African-European Slave trade.
See more: São Tomé - Wikipedia
History continues to show us that Slavery was once a part and still a part of life despite our modern advances.
See More: Human trafficking: A network of crime hidden across a vast American landscape
When it comes to reparations do we start with the relatives of people mentioned in Genesis in the Noah story (Genesis 9)?
I’d bet that our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors made slaves out of captured enemies, they just hadn’t found a way to write down a bill of sale or trade yet. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence showing people in prehistoric times being gentle or kind outside their own small group or tribe when it came to trade goods, wealth, property, etc...