ABSTRACT
Continually expanding globalization toward the end of the archaic period brought reorientation for Niumi. Portuguese merchants came by sea and connected westernmost sub-Saharan Africa first to an emerging trading network focused on the Cape Verde Islands and then to a plantation complex spreading across the tropical Atlantic. Origins of the grand intercontinental economic system, the Atlantic plantation complex, go back, once more, to the formative time of the Crusades. Trade picked up rapidly there following Portuguese arrival: when Gomes made a second voyage to Senegambia in 1460, he found two Portuguese vessels trading peacefully not far north of Niumi. The increase in trade was taking place at a time when Senegambia's long-stable political situation was beginning to change. Africans produced a group of Luso-Africans, who joined the others in becoming the cultural brokers between traders from the African and European societies.
