Spanish ships carry the first enslaved Africans west

Spanish vessels began the traffic in African people to the Americas in 1501, selling their captives in the Greater Antilles. Those put ashore had already been enslaved on the Iberian peninsula, where a domestic slave population had existed for generations through Portuguese voyages down the African coast after 1441. What happened in 1501 was the extension of a working European institution across an ocean. That matters for how the Atlantic system should be understood. Slavery in the Americas arrived with precedents, contracts, a body of law and merchants who already knew how to value a human being. The scale changed beyond recognition once sugar took hold, and the racial doctrine hardened over the following century into something the medieval Mediterranean would not have recognised. The machinery, though, sailed west in the first years of the sixteenth century, fully assembled, and it came ashore on this island first.

An estimated forty per cent of all the people carried across the Atlantic as slaves came from the Kongo and Angola region, a share far out of proportion to how many people lived there. One reason is that this was the only stretch of the coast where Europeans went inland themselves to seize captives directly instead of buying them from African traders at the shore. That method killed many more people in the taking, though by the height of the trade in the eighteenth century African entrepreneurs were running the inland end of it. The large functioning states that existed on this coast in the early sixteenth century were replaced by smaller and more frightened ones, and the region went backwards socially and politically for centuries. Europeans liked to describe Africans as cannibals. Africans watching neighbours carried off by the tens of thousands to an unexplained destination came to say the same thing about Europeans.

Around 1500 the world was polycentric and not yet capitalist. Several civilisations coexisted, some ancient and some newly formed. In China the Ming had ruled since 1368 and would rule until 1644. Three sultanates had emerged out of the Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman with its centre at Constantinople, the Safavid at Baku, and the Mughal, which ran from 1526 to 1707. In 1520 the Muscovites expelled the Golden Horde and declared Moscow the third Rome. In the Americas the Inca in Tawantinsuyu and the Aztecs in Anahuac were both sophisticated civilisations at the moment the Spaniards landed. No single centre imposed itself on all the others, and conflicts stayed local because there was no reference point against which alternatives had to be measured. Within a century Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac had been dismantled, the Maya were already in decline, and the Atlantic had become the axis around which the rest of the planet was arranged.

In 1492 an Italian navigator sailing for Spain reached a green Caribbean island and named it La Isla Espanola. Africans came to the Americas on that first voyage, but the year normally cited as the official entry of African slaves into Hispaniola is 1502. They were taken from villages and cities along the Gulf of Guinea and brought in to replace the Taino and Arawak, whom the Spanish had subjugated and enslaved and who were disappearing fast. Fleurant's point about what arrived with them is precise. They carried their religion, and the religion carried the historical memory of where they had come from, preserved in a form that could survive transport. A people can be stripped of language, lineage and name and still keep a working account of its own origin, provided the account is lodged in ritual rather than in writing. That is what happened on this island.