Reorienting the “origins debate”: Anglo-American trafficking in enslaved people, c. 1615–1660

ABSTRACT This article argues that trafficking in enslaved Africans and Natives constituted a chief element in English overseas colonization and was a primary component of English overseas trade from the mid-1610s. The managers of this commerce seamlessly translated Atlantic slavery into the Anglophone world decades before the establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672. Accordingly, there was never a transition in planter labor preferences from indentured servitude to slavery. Only access to supplies of enslaved Africans determined the number of Africans in Anglo-America while the act of trafficking in human beings automatically relegated those enslaved to inferior status.