As West Africa was connected to Europe and Asia by overland and now sea routes, the local population had been exposed to Old World pathogens and fared much better. Between 1550 and 1650, 650,000 Africans were trafficked to Spain and Portugal’s American colonies—more than twice the number of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in that period.[19] The early conquistadors’ decision to use enslaved Africans on their sugar plantations had unexpected but momentous consequences: it inadvertently set the whole of the American tropics on an inescapable path toward racialized slavery because the nascent
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