18. A Human Rights Pioneer Who Pioneered Centuries of Misery and Suffering
Slavery in the ancient and medieval world was based on war and conquest. Las Casas pioneered the then-revolutionary idea of slavery based on race. Before, ancient Greeks, Romans, and their Middle Ages successors had justified slavery based on the right of conquest. It was a race-neutral justification: those defeated in war and conquered could be enslaved. Caveats were sometimes carved out, such as the Spanish government’s prohibition of the enslavement of fellow Catholics. Conquered Muslims, Protestants, and pagans could be enslaved, regardless of their race, but not defeated Catholics. Nor could conquered non-Catholics who agreed to convert to Catholicism be enslaved. Las Casas gave Europeans a new and novel justification to enslave other human beings: their race. In this conception, Africans were fit for enslavement because they were Africans, period.
Eventually, Las Casas called for the abolition of all slavery. That closed the barn’s gate after the horse had already fled. Europeans embraced his original idea of race as justification for slavery, and ignored his later retraction. The result was the transatlantic African slave trade, which lasted for almost four hundred years, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Twelve million to fifteen million Africans were shipped to the New World for a life of slavery that that was often dark, cruel, brutal, and short. At least for those who survived the horrific Middle Passage to the Americas, in which millions died. That was just the tip of the iceberg: for every single African packed into a slave ship, up to five more perished in the violence that surrounded the capture of slaves and their transportation to the coasts and slave ships.
