The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

Chapter 5 studies the two principal avenues of acquiring freedom available during gradual emancipation rule in the northern Pacific lowlands: self-purchase for enslaved and Free Womb captives, and public manumissions administered by the new manumission juntas. As Claudia Leal argues, “the Pacific coast of Colombia stands out for being—in all likelihood—the place in the Americas where self-purchase accounts for the largest percentage of manumissions.” This popular practice continued during gradual emancipation, giving rise to a debt-ridden moral economy of familial self-purchase embedded in the northern Pacific lowland gold industry. In the rest of the chapter, I argue that the public manumissions performed by the juntas, while they transformed the political culture and meaning of manumission as a public good in Colombia, fundamentally retained the disciplining logic of the slaveholding order. In fact, a close analysis of the juntas’ finances reveals how they repackaged self-purchase as manumission, thereby erasing the lowland’s long legacy of black self-purchase.