ABSTRACT
The major growth in the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century was to be driven by the expansion of New World exports to Europe, and it is appropriate to begin with these economic forces, rather than with the process of Western colonization itself. Although, the slave trade became part of a dynamic in which the whites did not, or were unable to, prevent the development of independent associational patterns to prove a key stage in the creation of the black America that was part of the identity of the New World. Portuguese resilience in the South Atlantic provided the basis for a marked revival in the second half of the seventeenth century of the integrated Portuguese slave and sugar economy in the South Atlantic. The English Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, which was re-formed as the Royal African Company, was granted by its charter monopoly rights over the English slave trade between Africa and the West Indies.
