The first recorded European trade east of the Volta happens at Popo

The stretch of West African shore east of the River Volta came to be called the Slave Coast by Europeans, and the strongest kingdom on it through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Allada. Portuguese ships had probably worked their way east of the Volta by about 1472, buying pepper, ivory, cloth and the beads called coris, which could be sold again further west for gold. The earliest surviving record of a Portuguese attempt to trade on this particular coast is dated 1553, when contact was made at Popo. Allada was supplying captives soon afterwards. Two markets pulled the traffic along. Portuguese planters on the island of Sao Tome had built sugar estates and wanted labour for them, and behind that came a crossing to Brazil, again for sugar, and to Spanish America. Allada sold some ivory and cloth as well. It was always chiefly a seller of people. A large share of Haitians descend from this coast.

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 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.

In 1556 Henry the Second of France issued an edict enfranchising the remaining serfs of the Dauphine, the province in the southeast around Grenoble. Serfdom was already residual in France and the measure was largely administrative. Lawyers made more of it later. It became one of the texts cited in support of what French jurists called the freedom principle, the doctrine that the soil of France made free anyone standing on it, so that an enslaved person brought to a French port could sue for liberty and expect to win. That doctrine collided with the colonies. Saint-Domingue produced the wealth keeping the French treasury solvent and it produced it with slave labour, so French law had to hold two positions at once: no slavery in France, slavery everywhere France profited. The edict of 1716 and the declaration of 1738 were attempts to manage the contradiction by regulating masters who brought slaves to Paris. In 1791 it was settled from the other end.