Linked to the slave trade, Pere Gibert, born in Altafulla, was the last Catalan pirate. In 1832 he attacked the American merchant ship Mexican, which had departed from the town of Salem – the one from the witch hunts of 1692 – in Massachusetts, and stole the 20,000 dollars in silver it was carrying. Jordi Maluquer de Motes, emeritus professor of economic history at the UAB, has reconstructed the true events in the novel El darrer viatge de la goleta Panda (Editorial Base). The main events narrated are real and documented.

In recent years, the issue of 19th-century Catalan slavery, which had remained hidden, has begun to be discussed openly. Catalan industrialization cannot be explained without the blood money that flowed in from Cuba. But slavery has a centuries-long history throughout the world, including in Catalonia. Ancient Rome is its paradigm. With the fall of the empire, this form of total submission, which was also an economic system, did not disappear. Between the 5th and 10th centuries, there was a long transition between slavery and the feudal system: the shift from slaves to serfs (from direct slave exploitation to indirect, feudal, or manorial exploitation). Pure slaves continued to exist, often captured in wars, and now more prevalent in the urban world. In fact, the use of the term slave It resurfaced strongly in the 13th century, at the height of the Middle Ages, with the trafficking of captured men and women, primarily from the Black Sea and southern Europe.