The Slave Trade's Canary Islands: A Brutal Testing Ground

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History · Aug 22, 2026 · 5m · transcript

Before the transatlantic slave trade reached its horrifying scale, there was a smaller, crueler rehearsal: the Canary Islands. In the fifteenth century, European powers—first the Portuguese, then the Spanish—turned these Atlantic islands into a laboratory for slavery and colonial exploitation. This episode follows the arc from the conquest of the indigenous Guanches to the establishment of sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, long before Columbus sailed. We meet figures like Hernán Peraza, whose brutal governance sparked the 1488 Guanche revolt, and we trace the islands' role…