Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe, 1470–1975. Draft, not yet reviewed

Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe was a colony of the Portuguese Empire from the discovery of the islands in 1470 until 1975, when independence was granted by Portugal. The Portuguese explorers João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar discovered the islands around 1470, which they found uninhabited. It was only in 1493 when King John II of Portugal nominated Álvaro Caminha as captain-major of São Tomé Island that the first successful settlement was established. By the middle of the 16th century, São Tomé was generating enormous wealth for Portugal as it became the world's largest producer of sugar.

Seat of power: São Tomé

No rulers documented for this era yet.

Culture

Portuguese settlers started to import large numbers of slaves from mainland Africa to cultivate the rich volcanic soil of São Tomé Island with highly profitable sugar cane.
The geographical location of the islands made them a crucial trading post of the transatlantic slave trade as they served as an assembly point for slaves brought from the Gulf of Guinea and the Kingdom of Kongo that were destined for the Americas.
In the early 20th century, an internationally publicized controversy arose over charges that Angolan contract workers were being subjected to forced labour and unsatisfactory working conditions. Sporadic labor unrest continued well into the 20th century, culminating in an outbreak of riots in 1953 in which several hundred African laborers were killed in a clash with their Portuguese rulers.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Portuguese introduced coffee and cocoa in extensive large-scale plantations called roças, and in the first decades of the 20th century the islands were frequently the world's annual number one cocoa producer.

Picture

The most notable landmark at Água Izé is Roça Água Izé, a former plantation complex, and most of the preserved buildings date from the 1910s.

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0, file

Sources

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.