Competing European Powers

Slave merchants remained stationed on the coast, waiting to embark enslaved Africans into slave vessels heading to ports all over the Americas. But a variety of factors such as internal conflicts and the fact that local slave traders wanted to increase the price of captives could directly impact the offer of African captives.

The terms of the European presence along the coast varied depending on the period, the region, and specific ports. As explored in chapters 1 and 2, although the Portuguese launched the transportation of enslaved Africans to the Iberian Peninsula and then to the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, their presence in the Atlantic coastal areas of West Africa and West Central Africa was followed by other European powers. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch merchants started trading on the Loango coast, the coastline north of the Congo River, in West Central Africa.

The Dutch Republic and England also secured their presence on the Gold Coast. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch and the English, respectively, built one lodge and two forts in Anomabu, making it the busiest slave-trading port of the Gold Coast. In this region, most captives were acquired through warfare led by the Asante during the eighteenth century. But the trade in enslaved people at the Gold Coast seaports such as Elmina, Cape Coast, Accra, and Anomabu remained controlled by a coalition of several Fante polities until the early nineteenth century. Only in 1807 did the armies of the Asante Kingdom conquer the Fante-speaking coastal area, in the same year of the British abolition of the slave trade, which also marked the launching of several anti-slave trade policies in the region.⁴⁷

England, Sweden, and Denmark initially engaged in the gold trade on the Gold Coast. But as the colonization of the Americas evolved, European powers increasingly turned to Atlantic Africa to purchase enslaved people to work in the booming sugar industry of Brazil and the West Indies. In the eighteenth century, Portuguese, British, and French slave traders marked their presence in the Bight of Benin, where they erected fortresses. Along with the Dutch, these same European powers were also active in the trade of enslaved Africans at the ports of the Loango coast such as Cabinda, Malembo, and Loango. Here, during the eighteenth century, rivalry among European merchants was so pronounced that none of them were ever successful in obtaining the monopoly on the trade in enslaved Africans. European merchants were not allowed to build permanent buildings to conduct their trade on the Loango coast, as they were on the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin.⁴⁸ Therefore, ship captains and their crews erected provisional structures that mainly served as warehouses.

As the Dutch Republic, England, France, Denmark, and Sweden entered the Atlantic slave trade starting in the seventeenth century, they formed chartered maritime companies to regulate and centralize their commercial exchanges with Africa and the Americas. Portugal also developed similar ventures, but unlike those of its European counterparts, Portugal’s attempts to create chartered companies were short-lived. Thus, private merchants, many of whom were Brazilian-born individuals, kept the control of the slave trade between Atlantic Africa and Brazil. Although changing over time and varying from region to region, the Atlantic slave trade followed two systems shaped by the winds and sea currents that moved clockwise in the North Atlantic and counterclockwise in the South Atlantic.⁵¹

In the North Atlantic system, encompassing North America, the West Indies, Western Europe, and West Africa, the so-called triangular trade prevailed. In this model, shaped by clockwise winds and currents, slave ships outfitted in European and American ports sailed to Africa. They carried a variety of goods used as currencies to purchase enslaved Africans, who were then transported to the Americas, whence these same ships then transported raw products back to European ports.⁵² A slave voyage in the North Atlantic could start in any of the several many major European slave ports such as London, Liverpool, Bristol, Lancaster, Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, or Le Havre. During the seventeenth century, but especially in the eighteenth century, slave ships outfitted in European ports with cloth, iron bars, copper, alcohol, gunpowder, firearms, and manufactured goods sailed to the African ports of Gorée Island, Saint-Louis, Anomabu, Cape Coast, Ouidah, Loango, Malembo, and Cabinda, where they purchased captives.

In the South Atlantic, slave voyages were shorter not only because the distance between South America and Atlantic Africa was shorter but also because of the favorable counterclockwise winds and ocean currents. Here, for the most part, slave voyages did not follow the traditional triangular model. Instead, slave merchants sailing to West and West Central Africa often departed from Brazil and not from Portugal. Portuguese and Brazilian slave merchants navigated from the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife, the three largest slave ports in the Americas, mainly to African ports such as Ouidah, Benguela, and Luanda.

The rise of these two Atlantic systems and the development of the Atlantic slave trade were deeply associated with imperial expansion. European rivalries in Atlantic Africa mirrored the balance of power in the Americas. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the North Atlantic and South Atlantic systems became the battleground of conflicts among European empires that sought to control the slave trade from Africa to the Americas and to monopolize the burgeoning and profitable sugar industry. Spain entered the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century as well. Initially, the crown sold licenses (asientos) to private foreign individuals or compagnies who transported enslaved Africans to its colonies in the Americas. But this dynamic changed by the end of the century.⁵³ In 1578, the Portuguese ruler died in the battle of Alcácer-Quibir against the Muslims of North Africa. His uncle, who succeeded him on the throne, died two years later, without leaving any successor. This crisis eventually led to the victory of one of the candidates to the Portuguese throne, the Spanish king Philip II. As a result, between 1580 and 1640, the Portuguese and the Spanish crowns were unified and Portugal obtained the Spanish asiento.

The union of the Iberian crowns negatively impacted the relations between Portugal and the Dutch Republic. Although the Dutch were the major commercial partner of the Portuguese in Brazil, they were enemies of Spain, against whom they rebelled by declaring independence in 1588 during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). These conflicts led the Dutch to start a series of actions to take control of Portuguese domains in the Americas and Africa. In 1624 the Dutch occupied Salvador, then the Brazilian capital, which by that time was the second largest sugar-producing captaincy of the Portuguese colony. In 1625 the Portuguese expelled the Dutch, but in 1630 the Dutch successfully seized Recife, the capital of the captaincy of Pernambuco and Brazil’s first sugar producer. These conflicts reverberated in Africa as well. In 1637 the Dutch took control of the Elmina castle on the Gold Coast. In 1641 they also invaded Luanda and eventually controlled the coast of the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa.⁵⁵ Eventually, in 1654, the Portuguese expelled the Dutch from Brazil. As a result, the Dutch migrated on a massive scale to the West Indies, where their colonies expanded.

European rivalries transformed commercial exchanges during the seventeenth century. This increasing competition among European colonizers in the Americas coincided with the rise of the tobacco industry in Virginia, where by the middle of the seventeenth century, being a Black person already meant carrying the legal status of slave. During this same period, European powers secured their position in the West Indies.

The competition among European traders in West African and West Central African ports continued to impact the operations of the Atlantic slave trade until the early nineteenth century, when Britain and France banned their respective slave trades. Although in most regions of West Central Africa and West Africa, local rulers remained in control of the territory and the trade, their relations with European traders often remained asymmetrical. West Central African and West African rulers purchased guns and a variety of goods from the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The access to these weapons allowed them to wage war against neighboring states, which, in part, accelerated the cycle of acquisition of war captives to be sold into slavery.