Latin American Studies Blog!

This lecture video talked about a number of important factors all relating to history and slavery. I learnt that Indigenous populations plummeted because of violence and them having been turned into slaves or killed in the 1800’s following Christopher Columbus. Additionally, all the black slaves- 10 million slaves forced across to work in Africa. I know this perspective (African perspective) because of having learnt this in my high-school history class back in Kenya.   A lot of detail was shared with us then on how difficult the situations for slaves had been, most slaves did not even make it back to Africa because of the kind of conditions that were present on the boat, for instance, they were all forced to sleep and defecate in the same small space of the boat which leads to tons of slaves falling sick, and if they did fall ill they would be thrown off the boats. This was one of the biggest coerced movement of people in history. Because of Christopher Columbus, the population ...

1492 was the fall of Granada brought to an 800 year of Muslim war. The Alhambra showed how Jews were all evicted, and how this can be described as ethnic cleansing. The new world claimed that the people were natural slaves whereas the Las casas saw them as potential Christian converts. This was by far the most interesting video I have seen to date from taking this class. It was shocking to see how the population of indigenous populations of the Americas had been halved in 1550.   This then caused importing of slaves from Africa- it was interesting to see this as in high school in Kenya, we had been taught the history of slavery from the African perspective, reading textbooks that show how Africans had been exploited and to what degree. The lectures and videos showed me an entirely different lens to what had been going on the complete other end of the world in regard to African slaves and how they had been used on sugar plantations as well as why they had been imported and th...