The economic thought of the School of Salamanca and black slavery

Abstract

The philosophical, political, theological and economic reflections present in the authors of the School of Salamanca offer us a privileged vision of the world market that was shaped by the colonial expansion. The slave trade was a fundamental part of its inquiries, requiring an effort to unravel the emergence of strictly economic thinking regarding the African black slave trade to America. Thus, the moral problem present in the act of capture, which has been defined in the specialized literature as “the problem of slavery”, was overshadowed by an incipient economic reason that can only be understood since the emergence of modern economic science. and the proliferation of a sovereign state power that was building in turn on the margins of the world-system peripheral spaces of exclusion, appropriation and confinement.