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1050 AD – 1699 AD
1077
AD: Thousands of Saharan nomads have swept through Ghana, destroying
the richest empire in West Africa.
1400 AD: A thriving gold trade has been established down
the Zambezi valley to the Sofala coast.
1458 AD: The first Catholic missionaries come to Central
Africa from Portugal to convert the Africans.
1492 AD: Pedro Alonzo Nino serves on Christopher Columbus’s
ship on the first Spanish voyage to the "New World".
1526 AD: Spanish explorers bring the first Africans into
what is now the United States. Imported into the Carolinas as slaves to
build a Spanish fortress, the Blacks escape to Native American communities
farther inland. This is the first recorded slave revolt in North America.
1618 AD: The British government sanctions the slave trade
by granting monopolies to English trading companies.
1638 AD: The New England slave trade begins when a ship
from Salem, Massachusetts, sails to the West Indies with a cargo of Native
American slaves, who are exchanged for Africans and goods.
1645 AD: Ships sailing out of Boston bring slaves from
Africa to the West Indies, where they are exchanged for sugar, tobacco,
and wine, which in turn are sold for manufactured goods on return to Massachusetts.
This venture establishes what will become New England’s triangular
trade route.
1652 AD: Rhode Island legislators pass the first colonial
law limiting servitude. Applying to African Americans and Caucasians,
the statute limits bondage to no more than 10 years.
1667 AD: The British "Act to Regulate the Negroes
on the British Plantations" places severe restrictions on African
slaves. Slaves cannot leave a plantation without a pass, can never leave
on Sunday; they cannot carry weapons or posses horns or other signaling
devices. Whipping is the punishment for striking a Christian the first
time, branding on the face for a second offense.
1686 AD: In the Carolinas a law prohibits African Americans
from engaging in any business or trade.
1691 AD: The existence of free African Americans in
Virginia is seen as a threat by Caucasian colonists, who pass a strict
law to restrict manumissions.
1692 AD: Maryland passes a law that Caucasian men who
marry or have children by African American women must spend seven years
in servitude.
1693 AD: George Keith, a dissident Quaker, publishes
"An Exhortation," the first printed protest against slavery
in British North America.
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