Plotting the Angola Wave: Luanda Elites in the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1590–1640

Building on recent scholarship that views precolonial Africa in light of Brazilian history and vice versa, this paper reconstructs slaving networks linking Portuguese Angola and the Spanish circum-Caribbean during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. More than four hundred slave ships are presently known to have sailed from Luanda to Spanish Caribbean seaports between 1590 and 1640, transporting at least sixty-five thousand West Central African forced migrants to the Spanish Americas in the space of half a century.  Shipping records generated in the Caribbean reveal that colonists based in Luanda—including military and government officials who loom large in West Central African history—routinely participated in these slaving voyages.  While some sent captives to be sold on their behalf, others boarded slave ships as passengers or as captains of their own vessels.  Paradoxically, by tracing colonial elites’ well-documented investments in slave trafficking, we can better understand the actual trajectories and lived experiences of the enslaved West Central Africans who formed the “Angola wave.”  In addition to enabling historians to more closely examine this intersection of precolonial African history and colonial Latin American history, the study of Luanda elites’ economic activities and physical presence in the Spanish Caribbean complicates methodologies that emphasize bidirectional exchanges confined to the South Atlantic, or conceptual frameworks limited to analysis of movement within (but not beyond) the boundaries of the Portuguese empire.