Frontlines of Early Racial Capitalism: The Atlantic Rise of Afonso de Torres, 1520s–50s

In backing numerous slaving voyages and colonial enterprises over the course of four decades, the sixteenth-century Luso-Castilian merchant Afonso de Torres played a critical role in establishing sustained links between Atlantic Africa, Iberia, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Yet very little is known about Torres’s meteoric rise to prominence in Lisbon, where he lived in opulence for most of his life, and the lasting legacies of racial and economic inequality to which he contributed on multiple continents. Even less is known of the diverse people, especially enslaved and free Africans, whose labor, knowledge, and dispersal under violent and coercive circumstances made Torres’s accumulation of wealth and prestige possible. Understanding Afonso de Torres’s rise has been hampered by scholarly traditions that separate the histories of the Atlantic regions where the people who made his successes possible lived out their lives: enslaved men and women on sugar plantations in São Tomé, Black mariners on slaving vessels in the Gulf of Guinea, servants in stately homes in Lisbon and Seville, factors in trading houses in Santo Domingo, and agents pursuing settler enterprises in Brazil. Historicizing the racial and economic disparities borne of these contexts under the same frame of analysis reveals how Torres’s mercantile network weathered challenges of various orders between the 1520s and 1550s, including by diversifying investments between slaving and plantation enterprises, wielding influence in royal courts of Portugal and Castile, and seeking recourse in various legal fora to recover losses. Torres’s successes played a significant role, this paper argues, in instilling in Iberian merchant elites an expectation that Atlantic slaving and colonial enterprises could yield sustained forms of accumulation and prestige. In this way, Torres’s trajectory opens an important window onto the contours of early racial capitalism in the sixteenth-century Atlantic.