ABSTRACT
The history of the slave trade has been described from different perspectives. Contemporary sources tended not to address the topic from the perspectives of mobility, migration, or diaspora. Well into the twentieth century, many were directly employing terms such as ‘negro trade’, criminals, banishment or deportation, slave trafficking in areas of ‘non-civilization’, ‘coolie trade’, and even ‘house girls’. For Africa, where most of the transregional enslavement and forced migration occurred between 1700 and 1870, this is ‘pre-colonial’ history because, apart from relative regional exceptions, neither Iberians nor other Europeans or Americans could gain a foothold in continental Africa until around 1880. Europe had remained marginal in the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century despite the ‘first Iberian Atlantic’ and the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean, which are described to an extensive amount. Amid the great European crisis of the seventeenth century, Spanish global hegemony and the ‘first Iberian Atlantic’ broke down around 1640 to 1650.
