It's a hot topic, from time to time. I always point out that Americans did not invent slavery. But we usually don't go into too much depth about the history of slavery. I came across some interesting info that none of us are taught in school.

• Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492.
• Starting in 1494, Spain and Portugal entered into a series of treaties that attempted to divide the New World between themselves. That worked for South America, but the English and French didn't really pay any attention regarding North America.
• In 1500, a Portuguese explorer, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, landed in modern day Brazil, and claimed it for Portugal.
• The first colony in Brazil was established in 1516.
• Portugal began to import African slaves to Brazil in the 1550's.
• Portugal was by far the #1 European country involved in the African slave trade, and the primary destination was Brazil.
• The first British colony in North America was at Jamestown (Virginia) in 1607.
• About 3% of the African slave trade made it to what is now the USA. The other 97% was the Caribbean, South America, and the rest of the world.

What about prior to 1492?

• In the 1430's, the Portuguese sailed all along the African coast in search of gold. They established trading posts, and among the commidities traded were human.
• Many black African tribes went to war against each other. The victors enslaved their fellow man, and sold them into slavery to foreigners.
• But the Portuguese did not invent slavery.
• The Indian Ocean Slave Trade went back 3,000 years. People from India, Persia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe were all involved with slavery.
• The Roman Empire had slavery.
• The Athenians, who started the first democracy (it was the city state of Athens, not all the Greek people), actually had more slaves living in Athens than citizens.
• The Egyptian pyramids were built with slave labor.

In the beginning, slavery was a punishment for a crime. They didn't have maximum security prisons back then, as we do today. So, what to do with the outlaws?

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted ..."

It started as a punishment by means of paying restitution, then became the capturing of the defeated as a method of plunder in wartime, and ultimately a dehumanizing trafficking of humans.

The trafficking of humans started at least 1,000 years before Columbus set foot in the New World.

If we could magically go back in a time machine to the year 1491, was there any country on Earth that did NOT have slavery? It existed in Europe. White people were slaves, too. It existed among the indians in the Americas, with the Aztecs and the Myans -- long before the Europeans arrived. It existed in Asia, as it still does today. It existed in the Middle East, as it still does today. And of course, it existed in Africa -- by Africans -- as it still does today.

Food for thought.