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This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

End of Atlantic slavery, internal slavery, economic transitions, and European moral justifications

1. How did the concept of race change during the Modern Era?
2. How did colonialism and capitalism create racial hierarchies?
3. How was Atlantic slavery different from earlier forms of slavery?
4. How was the idea of African inferiority used to justify slavery and colonialism?
5. How did Gomes Eanes de Zurara influence European views of Africans?
6. How did pseudo-scientific racism develop in the 19th century and influence Nazism?
7. How did slavery and colonialism shape racial inequality after abolition?
8. How did Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s writings influence European perceptions of Africa and justify the Age of Discovery?
9. What political and administrative features enabled the Oyo Empire to become one of the most powerful states in West Africa?
10. In what ways did the Kingdom of Nri differ from the Oyo Empire in its political organization and methods of expanding influence?
11. How do the histories of the Oyo Empire and the Kingdom of Nri challenge common stereotypes about precolonial African societies?

Table of Contents

Modern Racism and Slavery: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Creation of Racial Hierarchies

The form of discrimination and segregation that became radicalized —and simultaneously demonized— during the Modern Era was ethnic and racial discrimination. More recently, this ranges from apartheid and the creation of racial ghettos driven by capital-based discrimination to the most distilled forms of racial discrimination.

What accounts for this? Two factors: (1) racial discrimination based on skin colors did not exist (or was extremely rare) before the Modern Era; and (2) the enclosure and privatization of land in England extended the power of a segment of the feudal nobility into the realm of capitalism: the privatization and commodification of land —followed by that of distant goods— culminated in the privatization of human beings. From the 16th century onward, slaves became private property under the law. To consolidate this capitalist fragmentation and classification of society, a new form of slavery was invented, characterized by two novel features: it was hereditary and based on skin color.

Slavery had existed for millennia but never in this form or on such an industrial scale. The same holds true for the concept of race. Discrimination was typically based on religion, culture, language, social class, caste, or estate; the very idea of race was an anomaly. The Romans had African administrators and even emperors. While determining their skin color is difficult, two factors are significant: (1) they were born in North Africa to families of varying social classes, making it more likely they were dark-skinned rather than white; and (2) the concept of race itself either did not exist or was irrelevant—so much so that no record was made of any of their skin colors.

The same holds true for the physical depiction of Jesus. The Bible, like the Quran, did not emphasize portrait-like physical descriptions of historical individuals in the way modern biographies often do. The Quran does not provide a detailed physical description of major figures like Muhammad (10 times) or Jesus (25 times).

For their part, Native Americans were unfamiliar with this concept of race and rejected it upon encountering Europeans. The Iroquois, for instance, adopted captives taken in wars with other peoples—conflicts that were infrequent under normal circumstances and never motivated by material greed. Many other peoples also adopted members of other native nations, as well as white Europeans and Black Africans.

Modern racism and slavery didn’t just happen by accident —they were deliberately built alongside European colonialism, global capitalism, and racial classifications that took shape between the 15th and 19th centuries. While various forms of slavery existed throughout human history, the transatlantic slave trade was fundamentally different. It was an explicitly racialized system that forcibly transported millions of Africans to the Americas, backed by an ideology created to define black people as inherently inferior.

When it comes to Native Americans, from pole to pole, from polar bears to penguins, the vast majority were wiped out in a genocidal process that mainstream history still often refuses to fully confront. Up to 90 per cent of the indigenous population perished —shattered by a lethal combination of introduced diseases, forced labor, and brutal wars of resistance.

For Africans, the mechanics of subjugation were different but no less devastating. European imperialists found it easier to impose lifelong slavery because the millions of human beings they commodified were ripped directly from their homelands. Stripped of their communities, land, and familiar cultural anchors, they were violently suppressed by a new wave of European firepower —driven by an unprecedented mix of fanaticism and economic greed, encapsulated by Adam Smith’s idea that individual self-interest benefits society as a whole. We can paraphrase this as a summary of the current dominant dogma as «my selfishness is good for society.»

More recently in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an urban structure based on the separation between (1) where workers lived and (2) where they worked. In this way, transportation and distance became instruments of labor and racial control —most notably in the South African apartheid. In other words, land privatization and zoning were not the only forms of social and racial control; services such as worker transportation also rendered the majority of the population vulnerable and dependent on private ownership of urban and rural infrastructure.

As European powers expanded across the globe, they built new economic models driven by mining, international trade, and massive plantation agriculture. Enslaved African labor became the primary engine driving the production of lucrative global commodities —from sugar, cotton, tobacco, and coffee to raw materials like gold, silver, iron, and fertilizer. In many regions, European colonizers brought in enslaved Africans specifically to replace decimated Indigenous populations, whose numbers had been swept away by European conquest, forced labor, and devastating foreign diseases.

To justify this brutal exploitation, European empires constructed a Eurocentric worldview. They placed their own culture, religion, and political systems at the peak of human civilization. Intellectuals, politicians, and scientists created theories of white racial superiority, framing Europeans as naturally advanced while portraying Africans and other non-European peoples as primitive or incapable of self-rule. These fabrications were aggressively pushed through pseudo-scientific theories, colonial schooling, and state propaganda to make an inhumane system seem natural and necessary. Those pseudo-scientific theories, developed largely in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 19th century (particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia), later influenced the development of Nazi racial theories and practices in the 20th century.

The birth of modern Atlantic capitalism relied directly on forced labor. The staggering profits generated by slavery didn’t just enrich plantation owners —they built the foundational wealth of European and American banks, shipping lines, insurance companies, and commercial trade networks.

The wealth generated by Atlantic slavery didn’t just enrich individual traders —it laid the groundwork for the modern global economy. Major commercial enterprises and financial juggernauts, including the Royal African Company, the Dutch West India Company, Lloyd’s of London, and early predecessors of top modern banks, profited directly or indirectly from the slave trade. They built their fortunes on plantation economies, maritime shipping, insurance policies, and lucrative colonial goods like sugar, tobacco, and cotton.

While many of today’s corporations were established long after slavery was abolished, the broader economic landscape tells a clearer story: countless modern industries, major port cities, and international financial systems grew directly out of an era shaped by forced labor and colonial exploitation.

Some of the world’s most powerful corporations that still exist today were founded or accumulated their early wealth through this system: Lloyd’s of London, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase (through predecessor banks), Citigroup (through predecessor banks), New York Life Insurance Company, Aetna, Brown Brothers Harriman (through predecessor firms), Bank of England (historical involvement in financing the slave economy), Royal Bank of Scotland (through predecessor institutions), Baring Brothers, Lloyds Banking Group (through predecessor banks), Royal African Company, Dutch West India Company, British East India Company.

When slavery was legally abolished in the 19th century, the racial hierarchy didn’t simply disappear. Instead, the ideas birthed during the slave trade adapted —fueling colonial rule, legal segregation, economic exploitation, and systemic discrimination. That is why modern racism cannot be viewed merely as individual bigotry; it is the lasting infrastructure of historical systems that shaped global power.

Truly understanding this history means refusing the comforting half-truths and facing the whole brutal system head-on: economics soaked in profit, political power built on domination, cultural bias normalized as «common sense,» and —above all— relentless resistance. Enslaved people and their descendants were never helpless shadows in someone else’s story. They disrupted, defied, and destroyed the order imposed on them through uprisings, cultural survival, underground abolition networks, and uncompromising struggles for equality that still demand you choose a side in today’s fight for racial justice.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c. 1410–1474)

In 1415, Portugal began its expansion into Africa with the conquest of Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on the northern coast of Morocco, marking the beginning of a centuries-long process of exploration, trade, colonization, and eventually the development of the Atlantic slave trade.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara was a Portuguese royal chronicler and one of the earliest historians of European exploration along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Serving under Prince Henry the Navigator, he documented Portugal’s early maritime expeditions and helped shape the ideology of the Age of Discovery. Crónica da Guiné (1453) was written and published to celebrate the achievements of Henry the Navigator and Portugal’s expansion along the West African coast.

The new view on Africa articulated in this book was dramatic. Before the 15th century, European prejudice was directed mainly toward differences in religion, culture, language, or political allegiance rather than the belief that entire peoples were naturally inferior. Slavery existed, but it was generally not justified as the inherited condition of a particular race. Gomes Eanes de Zurara helped reshape this thinking by portraying Africans as uncivilized people whose conquest and enslavement supposedly benefited them through conversion to Christianity. By presenting Portuguese expansion as a divine mission and slavery as an act of charity rather than exploitation, Zurara provided one of the earliest ideological justifications for the emerging Atlantic slave trade and later racial theories. idea that would be defended until the 20th century on different continents.

Zurara emphasized that Africans were descendants of Adam and could be converted to Christianity. In the same chapter, he wrote that the captives were «of the generation of the sons of Adam,» recognizing their common humanity even while defending their enslavement. He did not invent racism, but he was one of the earliest European writers to provide a systematic ideological defense of the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans. His writings helped lay intellectual foundations that evolved into modern racial ideologies supporting the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism.

Nevertheless, treating history as the handiwork of a few so‑called “great individuals” is not just simplistic —it is misleading. The figures who fill our textbooks are often merely those lucky or ruthless enough to ride a historical wave already in motion, not the ones who create it, and refusing to see this lets power hide behind the illusion of heroic personalities.

«…amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear … the images of a lower hemisphere.»

Zurara GE de. Wherein the Author reasoneth somewhat concerning the pity inspired by the captives, and of how the division was made. In: Beazley CR, Prestage E, eds. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Cambridge Library Collection – Hakluyt First Series. Cambridge University Press; 2010:80-83.

Few other experiences

Oyo Empire (c. 1300–1835)

Not egalitarian. A constitutional monarchy with some representative institutions.

The Oyo Empire was a powerful Yoruba state in West Africa, located in present-day southwestern Nigeria and eastern Benin. Founded around the 14th century, it reached the height of its power during the 17th and 18th centuries, becoming the largest Yoruba-speaking state. The empire was renowned for its formidable cavalry, sophisticated political administration, and its central role in regional and trans-Saharan trade.

Kingdom of Nri (900–1800)

The Kingdom of Nri was more egalitarian than many contemporary states, although it was not fully egalitarian. It combined unusual spiritual authority with a relatively decentralized social and political organization.

Slavery at the Birth of Capitalism

Modern Slavery

First, it was fundamentally built on race. This was a turning point. European powers didn’t just enslave people they conquered; they developed a toxic racial ideology to justify it, claiming Africans were inherently «lesser.» In older societies, slavery was often a byproduct of war, debt, or crime, and the people enslaved came from all kinds of backgrounds. Modern Atlantic slavery, however, turned African ancestry itself into a permanent badge of servitude.

Second, it was hereditary. Laws were written specifically to ensure that if a woman was enslaved, her children were property from the moment they were born. This effectively locked entire families and lineages into a cycle of permanent bondage. While older systems weren’t by any means «kind,» they often offered at least some paths to freedom—whether through military service, manumission, or religious conversion. That door was slammed shut in the plantation system.

Finally, the sheer scale was unprecedented. We’re talking about an estimated 12 million people ripped from their homes and forced across the Atlantic, with millions more perishing in the horrors of the Middle Passage. This wasn’t just local labor; it was a global, capitalist enterprise. The wealth that built modern Europe and the Americas was inextricably linked to this massive, industrial-scale exploitation of human life.

It’s important to clarify that this isn’t to say other cultures didn’t practice horrific forms of slavery—they did, from ancient Greece and Rome to various societies across the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. But the Atlantic system was unique in its particular cruelty: it combined a pseudoscientific racial ideology, rigid hereditary laws, and a global economic reach into a system of exploitation that remains, by any measure, one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Wall Street

Wall Street’s history is tangled up in both Dutch colonialism and the early American slave trade—two forces that shaped the very layout of New York City. Back in the 1600s, the Dutch West India Company brought enslaved Africans to the colony of New Netherland (which we now know as New York) to clear land, build roads, and raise fortifications. The street itself actually got its name from a defensive wall the Dutch built in the 1650s. By the early 1700s, New York had grown into a major hub for the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, in 1711, the city set up an official, public slave market right near Wall Street. For over half a century, men, women, and children were bought, sold, and rented out at this market, turning New York into one of the busiest slave-trading ports in British North America.

But Wall Street wasn’t acting alone. Major ports all over the world—including Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans in the US, alongside Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and Lisbon in Europe—were deeply embedded in the business of human trafficking. These cities formed a global network, financing, insuring, and executing the trade that connected Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The wealth generated by these slave-labor plantations—producing sugar, cotton, and tobacco—essentially built the modern global economy.

Because of this, many of the financial institutions and universities we recognize today have historical ties to slavery. The connections look different depending on the institution. Some banks and insurance firms directly backed the voyages, accepted enslaved people as collateral for loans, or funded plantation owners. For instance, Lloyd’s of London members insured slave ships, JPMorgan Chase has acknowledged that some of its predecessor banks took enslaved people as collateral, and early leaders of the Bank of England had direct investments in the trade. Even Ivy League schools like Harvard and Brown have traced their early funding back to wealthy donors who made their fortunes on the backs of enslaved labor.

When looking at this history, it helps to distinguish between direct and indirect involvement. Some companies traded enslaved people themselves, while others simply provided the financial plumbing—like loans and insurance—that kept the broader slave economy running. Over the last few decades, a lot of these institutions have started digging into their pasts. Many have published their findings, issued formal apologies, and started funding educational or restorative programs to reckon with how their foundations were built.

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