The emergence of the Atlantic World was intrinsically connected to the growth of long-distance trade and the rise of racialized slavery. In recent decades, scholars of slavery and the slave trade have highlighted the central role of the trafficking of enslaved humans in shaping the economic, political, social, and cultural processes of the Early Modern Atlantic World. The four papers in this panel shed light on the interconnections between trade in commodities and the commodification of enslaved humans. These processes were often not only transatlantic but also transimperial. Mary Hicks' paper explores the significance of gendered forms of commodification in the early transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on 16th and 17th-century Portuguese commercial correspondence from the West African coast, the paper investigates how slavers portrayed African women as both “gifts” and peças (the Portuguese term for one healthy enslaved individual), and the economic value attributed to female sexuality and motherhood by slavers. David Wheat's study delves into the rise of the slave trade and social formations in sixteenth-century São Tomé. Beyond providing new insights into the traffic of enslaved Africans to and through the archipelago, the paper addresses the economic importance of yams for São Tomé’s early free black population, including for female vendors of African descent. Thiago Krause's research examines the commercial ties between Bahia, Pernambuco (Brazil), and West Africa in the first half of the eighteenth century. Utilizing archival records from multiple empires, Krause's paper investigates the movement of secondary commodities within the slave trade to parse the specificities of both African and European demand. Fabrício Prado's analysis focuses on the tactics of Spanish American and U.S. merchants in Río de la Plata at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Prado's work reveals how US and Spanish slavers exploited fiscal privileges related to the slave trade to engage in extensive trading of commodities and manufactured goods in the region, thereby circumventing Spanish mercantilist restrictions.