WHY ITALY DIDN’T TAKE PART IN THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
A trade started by Portuguese merchants, and well continued by European super powers like the British and Spanish, never saw the involvement of the Italians. I’m sure you thought all European nations took part in the trade but the Italians and most Scandinavian countries didn’t partake in the practice. According to this American scholar, here’s why Italy weren’t involved in enslaving African during that time.
By Rich Sorrentino, PHD from Colombia University.
“For reasons both geographic and historic, Italy and what were once city states located on the Italian penisula, played virtually no role in the Atlantic slave trade. First, the geographic: the peninsula is located well to the east of ports from which African slaves were shipped from Africa to Europe, then to the Americas. And the historic: Italian banks, that could have gotten a piece of that quite lucrative action, were well past their prime by the time that the trade kicked in after Columbus’ voyages to the New World. Even by then, in 1492, the Medicis had made quite a hash of their now-former business so, as we all know, they weren’t involved in that business either; it fell upon the royals of Spain to front that enterprise. Who knows how things could have gone otherwise? Could the Medici have had an early stake in the New World? Apart from all idle speculation, Italian city states did have quite an active role in the earlier Mediterranean slave trade, when their geography and standing as a center of banking did favor their participation. And, arguably, Italians themselves were enslaved on their own land until fairly recent times. Slavery, whether of African peoples, Circassians, or Calabrian Italians, and as practiced still today in certain areas, was never a good thing, and yet never quite off the charts. From that greater perspective, the Emancipation Proclamation and successive Constitutional Amendments are unique and wonderful documents. So powerful indeed were those documents that they continue to color our history still today in ways both good and bad.“
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