In their influential collection of essays on Caribbean and Latin American port cities in 1991, Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss suggested that the presence of people of African origins, both slave and free, was an “especially important” topic in Atlantic history that deserved greater attention and study.¹ Since then there have been many important studies of the African presence in the Americas. As it happens, there has also been growing attention to African-European interactions in cities along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Three years before Knight and Liss’s book appeared, Joseph Miller’s celebrated Way of Death tied together the histories of Angola...

The town of Ouidah, in the modern Republic of Bénin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey), was one of the preeminent “port” towns on the Atlantic coast of Africa in the precolonial period.¹ It was a major point of embarkation of slaves for export across the Atlantic from the 1670s onward, and continued to flourish in this role even after the legal prohibition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, into the early 1860s. The only African exporting city that exceeded Ouidah in volume and importance for the transatlantic slave trade was Luanda, covered by Roquinaldo Ferreira in...

The city of São Salvador da Bahia, known as the city of Bahia through the nineteenth century, and later as Salvador, was founded between the open sea and the Bay of All Saints in 1549. The city held the position of Portuguese America’s colonial capital until 1763, when it was replaced by Rio de Janeiro, the closest and most active port linking the coast to the booming mining regions of the interior, especially Minas Gerais. Salvador also gained its high status from what happened in its immediate hinterland. From the mid-sixteenth century, when Salvador was founded, sugar cane cultivation began...

Havana has long served as a location for the major social and cultural processes that have marked the history of the Black Atlantic over the past five hundred years. In the sixteenth century, Havana became the largest city in the Caribbean, with an enslaved labor force that made up at least one-third of the city’s population. The transatlantic slave trade connecting Havana to West Africa lasted longer than that between Africa and any other New World destination, with its final abolition only coming in 1867, after as many as one million Africans had been forcibly brought to the island. Beyond...

For most of the eighteenth century, Cap Français was the largest town in the Caribbean’s wealthiest colony, French Saint Domingue. At the height of its commercial importance in the late 1780s, it was home to about 15,000 permanent residents. Two-thirds were slaves and about one-tenth were free people of color. Its resident white population of 3,600 was reinforced by the presence of 1,000 or so soldiers stationed in the city barracks and, intermittently, by some 2,500 transient seamen who spent up to several months in the city each year. Even counting these outsiders, more than 60 percent of its inhabitants...

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur is one of the key delineators of the American national character, a man whose Letters from an American Farmer has a canonical status in early American literature. He is primarily known for his bucolic depiction of rural Pennsylvania, as the originator of the notion of America as a mostly harmonious melting pot of different ethnicities and religions, and as the author of that most famous of American questions, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” What is little appreciated is that Crèvecoeur had a more complicated, less sunny and optimistic view of national...

Spain spent almost eight hundred years advancing its frontiers in the Iberian Peninsula, and the conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492 segued into the “discovery” and conquest of new frontiers in the Americas. Spaniards viewed these events as proof of God’s will and of their own divine mission, and so they attempted to tame the “savage” and “infidel” new people they encountered in the Americas and the equally “wild” new environments they entered.¹ Not surprisingly, indigenous populations resisted Spanish assumptions of superiority and dominion, and a rich historiography examines the resulting confrontations.² But the Spaniards also...

Westerners were world voyagers navigating the blue deep-water seas that Africans, Asians, Amerindians, and Polynesians knew as their own waters. Yet they usually relied on local pilots to guide them through green coastal waterways and into and out of port, enabling pilots to control the waters between land and the open ocean. Newspapers, ship logs, plantation records, and travel accounts indicate that the majority of ship pilots in New World slave societies were enslaved. These slaves possessed specialized knowledge of the hydrospace, or the area beneath the surface of the water, and how rivers, tides, currents, wind patterns, waves, and...

On July 10, 1771, Manoel de Salvador, a slave living in Luanda, was arrested on the accusation of committing a burglary. To defend himself, he laid out a set of startling arguments. According to Salvador, he had been “shipped from this city [Luanda] together with his mother and his brother to Rio de Janeiro when he was a child, and later he returned to this city [Luanda] and his brother stayed in Rio de Janeiro.”¹ In addition, he claimed that the significant amount of money that the Luanda authorities found at his house was “brought [to Luanda] by his friends...

For many decades, Latin American historians did not argue, debate, or investigate in detail where African slaves came from. Only during the last decades have scholars begun to emphasize the different experiences of enslavement for individuals who were born as slaves in the Americas from those who arrived as adults from abroad or realized that even those who experienced slavery in Africa could differently understand its meaning and practice in the Americas. Also only recently have scholars of slavery in the Americas begun to consider African history as a crucial component in understanding slavery in Latin America. The history of...

The Monument to the Discoveries overlooking the Rio Tejo, with the faces of Portugal’s early overseas explorers permanently etched in stone, acts as a memorial to Portugal’s imperial greatness—a testament to a glorious past in which Portuguese invention and bravery brought extraordinary wealth to the metropole, inspiring the envy of other Europeans. As most people know, Portuguese imperial supremacy was short-lived, as they were soon surpassed, in short order, by the Spanish, the Dutch, and the English. Nevertheless, the Monument to the Discoveries marks Portugal’s heritage and legacy for the modern world—a way of proudly asserting the country’s...

As explored in other chapters in this volume that focus on port cities in the Iberian Black Atlantic, this chapter analyzes seventeenth-century Mexico City confraternities that had an African or Creole membership or were described in colonial documentation as founded and led by negros or mulatos.¹ Confraternities helped seventeenth-century Africans and descendants of Africans survive through fostering community and providing health care and burials, and later encouraged a degree of upward social mobility. They also created a cultural, religious, and spiritual phenomena I call Afro-Mexican Baroque piety, which emphasized women’s leadership and penitence and participants’ humble, even enslaved status.² In...