Luso-African Islands and Spanish Archipelagos in the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ca. 1519-1545

Abstract Drawing on sources produced in the Spanish Caribbean and Canary Islands, this article reconstructs the chronology of the earliest known slaving voyages from Arguin, São Tomé, and the Cape Verde Islands to the Americas. As a corrective to narratives characterizing the early Atlantic slave trade as an exclusively “Portuguese” enterprise driven largely by the priorities and directives of Iberian monarchs, it argues that the incipient traffic from Africa to the Caribbean may also be viewed as an adaptation of older Mediterranean and trans-Saharan slaving practices; as a key component of a broader slaving industry centered in the Gulf of Guinea; and as a manifestation of integrated maritime circuits linking Portuguese and Castilian archipelagos in the North Atlantic. Peninsular Iberian monarchs and financiers benefited substantially from the early sixteenth-century traffic and attempted to control it, but closer attention to Spanish Caribbean and Luso-African contexts reveals the multiple genealogies of the Atlantic slave trade.