One Lisbon resident in ten is African by 1550

By the middle of the sixteenth century roughly ten percent of the people living in Lisbon were black Africans. Portugal had been buying captives on the West African coast since the 1440s, a century before the American plantation complex took shape, and for most of that period the destination was Portugal itself. The people brought into Lisbon worked as domestic servants, dockhands, water carriers, artisans and crew on the same ships that fetched more. A confraternity of black Catholics operated in the city and bought members out of slavery. This changes the shape of the story. African slavery in the Atlantic world was already an ordinary feature of a European capital, visible in the streets and in the parish registers, before Hispaniola had a single sugar mill. The plantation took an institution that already existed and enlarged it beyond anything its originators had pictured, and the enlargement is what turned a commerce into a system that shaped two continents.

An estimate of 1551 put the population of Lisbon at 100,000 people, a tenth of them enslaved. Arrivals were running at several thousand a year and the city held sixty to seventy slave marts. By the 1590s a well-placed observer claimed Lisbon was more black than white, and the yearly black festival was one of the high points of the city's social calendar. The treatment matched the numbers. In 1515 the king ordered that the bodies of enslaved Africans be thrown into a separate common ditch known as the poco dos negros. Free black people in Lisbon, Barcelona and Seville founded religious and welfare associations that bought freedom for others and paid for burials. In 1580 thousands of Lisbon blacks, most of them enslaved men fighting on a promise of freedom, defended Antonio of Crato against Philip of Spain. Portugal did not abolish slavery inside its own borders until 1773.

The encomienda was a grant from the Spanish crown giving a settler the right to take labour from a named group of indigenous people. Its stated justification was Christianisation. Its working purpose was to supply hands for the mines and the cattle ranches, to raise silk, and to feed the encomendero along with the workers in the towns. On the islands of the Caribbean the settlers pushed it so hard that the population it rested on died out. In 1549 a royal cedula changed what an encomienda could demand, moving the obligation from labour to tribute. Wallerstein reads that as a move away from something close to slavery towards a system in which the threat of force stayed in the background while the crop still had to be grown and sold. When the change cut the labour supply too far, Spain compelled wage work outright, called the cuatequil in Mexico and the mita in Peru. Every step was taken by law, and every step kept the estates supplied.

The Franciscan Diego de Landa wrote his Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan in 1556. Since that report, the decipherment of the Maya script has been a constant preoccupation of European and American scholarship, a story told in full by Michael Coe in Breaking the Maya Code. Landa is a double figure. He destroyed Maya books as idolatrous and he also recorded enough of the writing system for later scholars to work from, so the record of a civilisation survives inside the document of its suppression. That pattern repeats across the Caribbean. Almost everything known about the Taino of Ayiti comes through the writings of the men who were destroying them, from Columbus and Las Casas onwards, and the questions those men thought worth asking determine what can now be recovered. A script takes four hundred years to read again once the people who read it have been killed or forbidden to teach it.