"The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision."
#Image attribution: Yale Center for British Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_-_Sir_Francis_Bacon,_1st_Viscount_St_Alban_-_B1977.14.9772_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg
"The modus operandi of men like Hawkins was to sail to Guinea, acquire a cargo of enslaved people, by force and/or barter, and ship them to the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico.91 Here, Hawkins would claim inclement weather had forced him to the area (a tactic used by many illicit traders), offer platitudes to local officials and sometimes promise to help clear out foreign pirates from the area.92 In return, he asked the Spanish to purchase his enslaved people. If that failed, he became aggressive, after which the local elites, often under-manned and in relatively lightly defended settlements, would agree to purchase his human cargo."
"The modus operandi of men like Hawkins was to sail to Guinea, acquire a cargo of enslaved people, by force and/or barter, and ship them to the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico.91 Here, Hawkins would claim inclement weather had forced him to the area (a tactic used by many illicit traders), offer platitudes to local officials and sometimes promise to help clear out foreign pirates from the area.92 In return, he asked the Spanish to purchase his enslaved people. If that failed, he became aggressive, after which the local elites, often under-manned and in relatively lightly defended settlements, would agree to purchase his human cargo."
“It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, in "The History of White People"; W. W. Norton (2010); ISBN 978-0-393-07949-4; a 'New York Times' bestseller
"At the height of the Thirty Years War, news from South America, West Africa and the Caribbean was widespread and quickly distributed in the central European peripheries of the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the German retreat from sixteenth-century colonial experiments, overseas reports sometimes appeared in remote southern German towns before they were printed in Spain or the Low Countries."
"At the height of the Thirty Years War, news from South America, West Africa and the Caribbean was widespread and quickly distributed in the central European peripheries of the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the German retreat from sixteenth-century colonial experiments, overseas reports sometimes appeared in remote southern German towns before they were printed in Spain or the Low Countries."
"This article draws upon archival research and the published materials of former slaves, novelists, slave owners, abolitionists, Atlantic travelers, and police reports to link the systems of slave hunting in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the US South throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."