Although the Atlantic world began in Western Africa, this important fact is rarely to be gleaned from most works of Atlantic history. Yet the Spanish settlement and conquest of the Canary Islands in the late fifteenth century only gathered pace as a direct response to Portuguese activity there. Almost thirty years separated the Portuguese arrival at the Senegal River in 1444 from their arrival at what became the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in 1471.

The birth of this Atlantic world in Western Africa was multifaceted. Primary creolisation in Upper Guinea and the process of state formation in medieval Portugal shaped an early Atlantic economy influenced profoundly by violence and its legacies. Yet on the other hand, these conditions had enabled a tradition of cultural sharing to develop in Western Africa. It was this combination of violence and flexibility which came to characterise Creole societies both here and elsewhere in the Atlantic world.