This session brings together new work on the origins of the slave trade to and in the Spanish Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the emerging areas of interest in the burgeoning scholarship on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic world. Scholarly attention to the Spanish involvement in the slave trade was for many decades centered around the Spanish Caribbean in the nineteenth century, but recently historians in the U.S. and Spain are generating new research that drives our understandings of the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade back to Spanish empire and to the sixteenth century (or earlier). This work is particularly important in centering Spain and Spanish America in the broader history of the slave trade in the Atlantic world, reminding us that by the time the White Lion disembarked the individual captives who are often popularly recognized as the "first" enslaved people to arrive in the Americas, the Spanish had already been importing slaves from Africa to their territories there for over 100 years.

This session features three papers with different geographical and chronological approaches. Emily Berquist Soule's paper on Spanish expansion and enslavement in the fifteenth-century Canary Islands examines how the islands became a testing ground for "legal" justifications of slavery, as mediated by both the state and the Catholic Church, highlighting how the logic developed therein would be central to future campaigns to enslave both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. Marc Eagle's work picks up in the earliest decades of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Spanish America by focusing on the pitfalls and promises of the copious records of the Spanish Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), which he uses to trace the evolution of early royal policies for the slave trade. As such, it not only contributes to expanding our growing knowledge of how Spain managed the trans-Atlantic slave trade in its earliest years, but it also speaks more broadly to the challenges of working with sixteenth-century archival records of the slave trade. Erin Stone's work on the enslavement of indigenous peoples in sixteenth-century Araucania (today Chile and Argentina) explores how the practice of enslaving native Americans continued in peripheral areas of the Spanish empire well after it was conclusively outlawed by the New Laws of 1542. Her approach also highlights the cultural connections indigenous groups developed in response to these pressures, particularly the Mapuche identity which was instrumental in helping indigenous groups of the area to maintain independence throughout the colonial period. The papers will be discussed by one of the pre-eminent scholars of Afro-descended peoples and slavery in the Spanish Atlantic world, Vanderbilt University's Jane Landers.