The Atlantic Slave Trade in Motion
The development of commercial, cultural, and religious exchanges between Portuguese and African agents is entangled with European oceanic expansion, which started in Africa and reached the Americas and Asia.
As early as the fifteenth century in Senegambia, Portuguese agents raided local populations, transporting them as slaves to the Iberian Peninsula and the islands on the Atlantic African coasts. As the need for an enslaved workforce increased, the Portuguese developed diplomatic relations with African potentates. Through their sustained access to African markets, the Portuguese became central actors in the development of the slave trade with Europe. With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, the Portuguese also became crucial players in the Atlantic slave trade with the newly conquered continent. Likewise, as Portuguese navigators reached Brazil in 1500, their presence and the future arrival of Brazilian-born traders in West Central African ports accelerated existing divisions among states and chiefdoms that competed to gain territorial expansion and control larger numbers of subjects.61 As we will explore in subsequent chapters, the impact of the presence of the Portuguese (and later of other European powers on the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa) differed from region to region and varied over time. But understanding these early interactions allows us to explore in chapters 2 and 3 the development of the trade in enslaved Africans to the Americas between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
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