Gifts or Peças: The Commodification of African Women in the 15th- and 16th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the 1440s when Portuguese mariners established the first direct commercial relationships with commodity traders on the West African coast, travelers (such as Gomes Eanes de Zurara) highlighted the importance of procuring female captives during opportunistic raiding activities. In contrast to characterizations of the later transatlantic slave trade as particularly male dominated, during the early era of West African slaving, women played an integral role. In this moment, African women circulated in and out of Portuguese trading settlements on the Senegambian coast as either “gifts” from local potentates to European men with whom these lineage heads hoped to make commercial alliances or “peças” the Portuguese value-term for one healthy enslaved individual assessed for taxation and trading purposes. Contributing to scholarly debates about the complicated relationship between race, reproduction, captivity and commercialization in the Atlantic, this presentation examines little studied early commercial correspondence from the West African coast to the Portuguese crown to understand the significance of gendered forms of commodification in the early transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, it establishes the financial value slavers ascribed to female sexuality and motherhood.