As the Portuguese pioneers circled Africa in the late fifteenth century, the many societies that bordered the Atlantic entered into the larger economy that developed with the first voyages to the Americas. While not all of Africa was drawn into this network of interactions even in 1800, a sizable zone extending inland from the coast did. This zone included not only those societies in direct or indirect contact with the Atlantic coast, but also a substantial section of the East African coast and the island of Madagascar, which were bordering on or found in the Indian Ocean. While the Indian Ocean network that the Portuguese created in their Estado da India (State of India) in the sixteenth century had frequent maritime contact with Europe, the African states along the East African coast and Ethiopia had little to do with the Atlantic world as it developed with the creation of an American network.

Africa’s participation in the Atlantic world was largely through trade. Unlike the Americas, where dramatic conquest, settlement, and transformation under European direction took place, Africa was not conquered or settled during this time. Portugal managed to build a small colony in Angola in the seventeenth century and colonized the offshore island groups of São Tomé and Príncipe, the Cape Verde Islands, and the islands of Madeira and the Azores; elsewhere along the Atlantic coast, Europeans barely clung to small, vulnerable trading posts, acquiring their slaves from African sellers while often paying taxes and rents to African rulers for the right to do so.