within two years they had forced the king to revoke this law and to permit enslavement once again. As new economic activities began – cattle farming on lands cleared of forests, and mining after the discovery of gold in – the demand for cheap labour continued. It was clear that the local people would resist enslavement. The alternative was to turn to Africa.
Between the 1550s and 1880s (when slavery was abolished in Brazil) over , , African slaves were imported into Brazil. This was almost half the total number of African slaves imported into the Americas. In , there were individuals who owned as many as a thousand slaves. From the early debates in the 1780s on abolishing slavery, there were those who argued that slavery existed in Africa prior to the entry of the Europeans, indeed slaves formed the bulk of the labour-force in the states being formed in Africa from the fifteenth century.
They also pointed out that European traders were helped by Africans who helped capture young men and women to be sold as slaves, in return for crops imported from South America (maize, manioc and cassava, which became their staple foods). In his autobiography ( ), the freed slave Olaudah Equiano replied to these arguments by saying that slaves in Africa were treated as part of the family. In the 1940s, in his book Capitalism and Slavery , Eric Williams was one of the first modern historians to initiate a reassessment of the suffering experienced by African slaves. C ONFRONTATION OF C ULTURES M AP : Africa, indicating regions from where slaves were captured T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY