Slave Trading Networks in the Spanish Caribbean in the First Half of the 17th Century

During the period from 1595 to 1640, major Portuguese investors held a monopoly contract from the Spanish crown to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. The actual importation of captives to the circum-Caribbean depended heavily on Portuguese merchants resident in the region, particularly in the two highest-volume ports of Cartagena and Veracruz. Although numerous Portuguese individuals had lived in and circulated through Spanish America long before this point, the 1580–1640 union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns under the Spanish monarch facilitated the incorporation of Portuguese slave merchants with transatlantic connections into Spanish society overseas. Records of royal investigations into unscheduled slave ship arrivals to lower-volume Caribbean ports, such as San Juan in Puerto Rico, show that a wide array of other individuals, including highly mobile shipmasters, Spanish royal officials, and permanent residents of Spanish cities, also played key roles in moving groups of enslaved Africans into and through the region. However, Inquisition tribunals in Lima, Cartagena, and Mexico saw many Portuguese slaving merchants from New Christian families as suspected Judaizers. While records of their arrests and interrogations during the 1630s and 1640s contain valuable insights into personal and commercial connections across the Caribbean, they also provide a distorted sense of slaving networks as separate from Spanish society and primarily defined by religious identity, rather than embedded in the region and built around mutual commercial benefit. The importance of the slave trade networks in operation in the first half of the 17th century is evident in the rapid collapse of slaving voyages to the Caribbean region after 1640, when Portugal successfully rebelled against Spanish control.