Comparative Slavery in the Americas — Midterm Study Guide

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical concepts, institutions, and figures from Weeks 1–7 of Comparative Slavery in the Americas.

Slavery (Patterson Definition)

The permanent, violent domination of a natally alienated and generally dishonored person, who is positioned as an outsider, treated as chattel property or a commodity, assigned specific often inferior occupations, and held by force or threat of force while vulnerable to terror.

Agency

The ability of individuals to make choices and take action within constraints, demonstrated by enslaved people through resistance, negotiation, forming communities, and pursuing freedom.

Middle Passage

The transatlantic ocean crossing through which enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas under brutal confinement, coercion, and violence as commodities intended to meet colonial labor demands.

Atlantic Creoles

Individuals knowledgeable in both African and European cultures, languages, and societies who often served as cosmopolitan trade intermediaries across the Atlantic world while remaining marginalized and denied full privileges in both societies.

Afro-Iberians

People of African descent connected to Iberian societies, particularly Spain and Portugal, who possessed diverse legal statuses, occupations, languages, and religious backgrounds.

Castas

The system of racial categorization established in Spanish colonial America to codify and reinforce a social hierarchy based on ancestry, parentage, and physical appearance within an increasingly mixed population.

Quilombo

A community established by escaped enslaved people (maroons) in Brazil, often located in difficult-to-access areas and organized for self-defense, mutual survival, and resistance against European colonial authority.

Black Confraternities (Cofradías)

Lay Catholic religious associations organized around devotion to a saint that provided African-descended people in colonial Latin America with spaces for community, mutual aid, religious celebrations, and social or political networks.

Requerimiento

A Spanish declaration demanding that Indigenous populations submit to the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church; compliance required laboring for the Spanish without forced conversion, while refusal justified war, enslavement, and domination.

Asiento

A formal monopoly contract granted by the Spanish Crown authorizing merchants the exclusive right to import enslaved Africans into Spanish American colonies.

Candomblé

An Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion combining Roman Catholicism with African spiritual traditions, involving physical expressions of worship such as dance, specific music, food, and ritual attire.

Syncretism

The blending and combining of distinct religious traditions—such as African, Catholic, and Indigenous beliefs and material practices—into new cultural forms.

Prester John

A mythical, wealthy Christian king in Africa sought by early European explorers in the hope of securing an alliance against Muslim powers.

Black Conquistadors

People of African descent who participated in the Spanish military conquest and early colonization of the Americas, demonstrating diverse legal statuses and complicating simple assumptions about race and power.

Spanish New Laws of 1542

Spanish colonial legislation that restricted certain forms of Indigenous enslavement, leading to intensified disputes over colonial labor supplies and contributing to the demand for enslaved Africans.

Palmares

A prominent Brazilian quilombo formed by people who escaped slavery, representing a multi-settlement society that organized armed resistance and challenged the colonial plantation economy.

Paula de Eguiluz

An African-descended woman in colonial Spanish America investigated by the Inquisition who used her familiarity with Spanish institutional and religious expectations to navigate legal proceedings and mitigate punishment.

Mansa Musa

The fourteenth-century ruler of the Mali Empire renowned for his extraordinary wealth, promotion of Islam, control of trans-Saharan trade routes, and his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Plantation Complex

An economic and agricultural structure connecting labor-intensive crop cultivation (such as sugarcane), coercive labor control, capital investment, ocean transport, and interregional markets.

Social Death

The condition of total natal alienation, loss of lineage ties, and removal from social and political networks experienced by an enslaved person in society.

Manumission

The legal act through which a slaveholder voluntarily grants freedom to an enslaved person.

Emancipation

The institutional or legal release of an individual or group from the condition of enslavement, which altered legal status without necessarily removing social or racial inequality.

Household Slavery

A form of servitude found in some West and Central African societies where captives were incorporated into domestic units and lineages to expand labor and kinship strength rather than deployed on commercial plantations.

Bartolomeu Dias

A Portuguese explorer who reached the southern tip of Africa in 1488, marking an important advancement in European long-distance oceanic navigation.