Interrogating the Books of Slave Licenses: Peninsular Perspectives on the Early Decades of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Spanish America

This presentation will re-examine the records of the earliest decades of the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America kept by the Casa de Contratación, as an unreliable source of information about slaving voyages that can nonetheless offer unique insights when examined closely and paired with other kinds of sources from this period. In these account books, royal grants of licenses to transport enslaved Africans were copied and annotated with groups of captives registered to specific voyages, to be embarked in Seville or acquired in Africa, until the total number of licenses given was reached. Although these records primarily capture only the intentions of license holders, merchants, intermediate agents, royal officials, and slaving voyage organizers before the actual departure of slaving vessels, the information they contain also sheds light on the way that notions of enslavement and the process of supplying Spanish America with enslaved laborers developed up to about 1550; occasional marginal notes also provide glimpses of individual captives’ experiences or unexpected voyage outcomes. In conjunction with documentation related to completed slaving voyages, these account books can be interrogated for a sense of how royal policy evolved in response to trends in Iberia, Africa, and the Caribbean that are otherwise largely invisible in these peninsular records. Finally, additional documentation provides vital context for account books that appear to reduce the enslavement and forced transport of thousands of captives to a mundane bureaucratic procedure, carried out in an environment that was at once familiar with the presence of enslaved Africans and conceptually and physically distanced from much of the violence fundamental to this nascent transatlantic slave trade.