Note 27 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

Monopolies of licenses were granted by the Spanish monarchs for the importation of negro slaves to the West Indies, first to their own subjects, and later on to certain Genoese and Germans, and finally, by a special asiento, or contract, the Spanish government conveyed to the English the “exclusive right to carry on the most nefarious of all trades between Africa and Spanish America.” The British engaged to transport annually to the Spanish Indies during a term of thirty years, four thousand and eight hundred of what, in trade language, were called “Indian pieces,” that is to say, negro slaves, paying a duty per head of thirty-three escudos and one-third.27 So great was the number of negroes imported into America from 1517, when Charles V first permitted the traffic, until 1807, when the slave trade was abolished by an act of the English Parliament, that it has been computed that their total number was not less than five or six millions. In one single year, 1768, it is said that the number torn from their homes and country and transported to Spain’s new colonies was no less than ninety-seven thousand.28