The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery

The present study attempts to map out neglected research territory and to marshal a powerful body on silenced evidence that disprove the current view that the English in early modern Europe were laggards in exploting black Africans and Moors as salves and domestic servants. The finding of the author’s researches, carried out in Spanish and English archives, have brought to light that the dawn of British black slavery has to be set back to the 1480s. A crop of records unearthed in Seville, Simancas, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife leave no doubt about the fact that the English merchants resident in Andalusia at the turn on the 15th/16th centuries were the pioneers of British transatlantic slavery. The author also presents new avenues for further research into the underexplored black presence in early modern England. Thus he has addressed the gender issue raised by the presence of female black domestic servants in English and New Christian merchant households. The gender issue also hinges on the fact that a sizeable number of Elizabethan women from all social classes owned black domestic slaves, obviously in imitation of Spanish and Portuguese women. The concept of monogenesis, which was embraced on the Continent by clergymen and painters, such as Hyeronimus Bosch, began to take shape in British consciousness at the beginning of the 17th century, that is, too late to be of any consequence as a bulwark against the commercial exploitation of the black Africans.