The business relationships the Portuguese struck with traders in west Africa’s coastal cities were often fruitful, although many of them would strike us today as morally abhorrent. One of Africa’s longest-standing trades was in enslaved people, and the Portuguese had few qualms about joining in. They had dabbled in the market via the Castilian-controlled Canary Islands since the late fourteenth century, but as their contacts in west Africa multiplied, so did their use and desire for African captives, who in some areas could be exchanged for European horses at the rate of between nine and
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