ABSTRACT

The place of Portugal and Spain in the slave trade was in many ways shaped by the two Iberian powers’ colonisation projects in the Americas and Africa. The early phase of the Iberian slave trade was deeply intertwined with Portugal’s first encounter with African societies in the fifteenth century. Portugal had relied on African enslaved labour from Senegambia to develop sugar production on the Atlantic islands and continental Portugal. The prohibition of the slave trade to mainland Portugal in 1761 intended to prioritise the shipment of enslaved Africans to Brazil, Portugal’s main colony in South America, where enslaved labour was in acute demand due to mining and agricultural activities. Portugal’s well-established connections with Africa and the economic and geopolitical imperative of providing labour to Brazil’s growing economy profoundly shaped the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Viceroyalties of New Granada and Peru, the transatlantic slave trade evidenced greater diversity in terms of African zones of provenance.