The Atlantic slave trade was not a British invention. It was a Portuguese one, and Portugal dominated it for its first 150 years. Understanding this matters because the reparations campaign tends to focus its demands on Britain, the country that ultimately abolished the trade, rather than on Portugal, the country that started it and ran it longest.
Portugal began exploring the West African coast in the early fifteenth century under Prince Henry the Navigator. The first enslaved Africans were brought to Portugal around 1441, and the trade grew steadily through the rest of the century. By 1500, Portugal had established trading posts along the West African coast and had begun transporting enslaved people to its Atlantic island colonies, to Brazil, and to Spanish America.
For most of the sixteenth century, Portugal controlled the Atlantic slave trade almost entirely. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 had divided the world between Portugal and Spain, and the slave trade was considered a Portuguese monopoly. Other European nations were largely excluded.
Britain did not become a significant participant in the Atlantic slave trade until the mid-seventeenth century. The Royal African Company, which held the British monopoly on the trade, was founded in 1660, more than 200 years after Portugal began the trade. Britain was a latecomer to a system that had been running, and doing enormous damage, for two centuries before British ships became a major presence in it.
When Britain abolished the trade in 1807, Portugal continued it for another sixty years, finally abolishing slavery in its colonies only in 1869. Brazil, the largest destination for enslaved people in the Americas, was a Portuguese colony and later a Portuguese-speaking independent nation. Brazil received approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans, nearly half of the entire Atlantic trade. Britain received far fewer.
