ABSTRACT
The Black Atlantic was born not in the eighteenth century but in the mid-fifteenth century, when Portuguese factors reached the Upper Guinea Coast and began a trade with local rulers for luxury goods, including the enslaved. Free and enslaved Africans had long formed important segments of the urban populations of southern Portugal and Spain, and they became cultural brokers in the Upper Guinea trade. While Portugal concentrated on developing trade and colonies in Africa, Spain focused on the Americas and Africans participated in each of Spain’s exploratory voyages across the Atlantic and their wars of conquest. Once the Indian wars on Hispaniola waned and colonization was underway, small groups of battle-tested Africans joined in new Caribbean campaigns and in the spectacular conquest of the Aztec empire. Chronically short-handed Spanish officials in the Americas very early began to include both free and enslaved Africans in their military forces.
