The Canaries seldom feature in world history books, and even less in discussions of current affairs, but this was the very first European colony in the Atlantic, and indeed the place where Portuguese, Spaniards, and others deepened their taste for overseas empire, along with many of the darkest methods of achieving it. These included chattel slavery, genocide, violent religious indoctrination, and settler colonialism, all of which saw their Atlantic debuts on these islands.
