Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

In the sixteenth century, approximately 277,000 Africans were brought in chains across the Atlantic, with nearly 90 percent of them going to Spain’s newly conquered American territories, led by Cartagena, New Spain, and Veracruz. Over its long course, this human traffic would bring an estimated 2.07 million people to the Spanish Americas, either by direct shipment across the Atlantic, or via a lively intra-American trade, trafficked onward from places like Dutch Curaçao or English Jamaica. This made the Spanish Americas the second most important zone of forced permanent African migration, after Brazil. As a region, it places well ahead of either the British or French Caribbean, and it saw vastly greater slave traffic than what, somewhat paradoxically, is the most heavily documented region of the trade by far: the English colonies that later became the United States. In no other part of the New World has the trade in Africans been so little studied, and nowhere has the historical erasure of Blacks been so shockingly complete. And yet the available evidence shows that Africans were just as indispensable to making Hispanic Latin America viable as they were in the domains of the hemisphere’s other major European colonial powers.*