In the mid-16th century, Africans arrived in Japan alongside Europeans, as crew members and slaves. Yasuke, an African slave, possibly from Mozambique, arrived in Japan in the late-16th century alongside Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano.

daimyos

Japan had an official slave system from the Yamato period (3rd century A.D.) until Toyotomi Hideyoshi abolished it in 1590. Afterwards, the Japanese government facilitated the use of “comfort women” as sex slaves from 1932 – 1945.

1855–68), although the slave trade was not abolished legally until 1923 with Ethiopia’s ascension to the League of Nations. Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in the early 1930s, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million.

The first true slave society in history emerged in ancient Greece between the 6th and 4th centuries. In Athens during the classical period, a third to a half of the population consisted of slaves. Rome would become even more dependent on slavery.

Sumer or Sumeria is still thought to be the birthplace of slavery, which grew out of Sumer into Greece and other parts of ancient Mesopotamia. The Ancient East, specifically China and India, didn’t adopt the practice of slavery until much later, as late as the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.

(See also Olivier Le Jeune; Sir David Kirke; Chloe Cooley and the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada; Underground Railroad; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Slavery Abolition Act, 1833; Slavery of Indigenous People in Canada.)…Black Enslavement in Canada.

First enslaved Africans arrive in Jamestown, setting the stage for slavery in North America. On August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists.

Trading African slaves was part of the transatlantic slave trade by Denmark-Norway around 1671, when the Danish West India Company was chartered until 1 January 1803 when the 1792 law to abolish the slave trade came into effect. However, an illegal trade in enslaved Africans continued.

1608

Anne Burras was an early English settler in Virginia and an Ancient Planter. She was the first English woman to marry in the New World, and her daughter Virginia Laydon was the first child of English colonists to be born in the Jamestown colony.

As the winter wore on, scores of Jamestown’s inhabitants suffered from diseases associated with malnutrition and contamination, including dysentery, typhoid and scurvy. By the time Lord De La Warr showed up with supplies in June 1610, the settlers, reduced in number from several hundred to 60, were trying to flee.

Anne Burras

Marriage was above all an economic transaction, and in no place was this more apparent than in the early 1600s in the Jamestown colony, where a severe gender imbalance threatened the fledgling colony’s future. The men of Jamestown desperately wanted wives, but women were refusing to immigrate.

Not long after Captain Newport left, the settlers began to succumb to a variety of diseases. They were drinking water from the salty or slimy river, which was one of several things that caused the death of many. The death tolls were high. They were dying from swellings, fluxes, fevers, by famine, and sometimes by wars.

Beer, cider and other relatively weak fermented beverages were almost universally consumed from the earliest days of Virginia’s history.

Williamsburg

In 1676, Jamestown was deliberately burned during Bacon’s Rebellion, though it was quickly rebuilt. In 1699, the colonial capital was moved to what is today Williamsburg, Virginia; Jamestown ceased to exist as a settlement, and remains today only as an archaeological site, Jamestown Rediscovery.

There are many theories about what became of Roanoke, none of which are particularly pleasant. Historians have posited that the colonists were killed by Native Americans or hostile Spaniards, or that they died off due to disease or famine, or were victims of a deadly storm.