Long before the stabilization of fortified trading posts and the consolidation of European sovereignties, a category of men settled permanently along the coasts of West Africa, outside any strict institutional framework. Neither conquerors in the classical sense nor mere rootless adventurers, these individuals (known as lançados) played a decisive role in the establishment of the earliest transatlantic commercial networks. Their importance was long minimized. It now deserves to be reassessed, as their actions shed light on the origins of the slave trade and, more broadly, on the initial mechanisms of modern globalization.
The lançados, or how Europeans settled in Africa structured the Atlantic slave trade
The term lançado (literally “cast out”) appears in Portuguese sources as early as the late fifteenth century. It refers to Europeans, mostly of Portuguese origin, who settled voluntarily or under constraint along African coasts, on the margins of royal authority. Some were independent merchants seeking to evade taxes and monopolies. Others were degredados, convicts sentenced to exile. Many were Jews or New Christians fleeing inquisitorial persecution.
What unites these disparate profiles is less their social origin than their structural position: they prospered in the interstice between claimed European sovereignty and the reality of local African power. Where the Portuguese Crown asserted exclusive control, the mere presence of the lançados revealed the weakness of this nascent imperial apparatus.
At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese monarchy sought to impose a monopoly over trade along the West African coast, particularly the trade in captives. This policy relied on the creation of feitorias, fortified trading posts intended to centralize exchanges and taxation. In theory, all transactions were to pass through these official intermediaries.
In practice, the length of the coastline, the dispersion of populations, and the autonomy of African kingdoms made such control illusory. The lançados exploited this gap. Settled in Senegambia, Casamance, the estuaries of the Cacheu and the Geba rivers, and as far as Sierra Leone, they traded directly with local authorities, often with their explicit consent. Portuguese royal archives testify to persistent concern over these “illegal” networks, accused of depriving the Crown of substantial revenues.
Unlike agents of the feitorias, the lançados lived permanently within African societies. They married women from influential lineages, thereby sealing political and commercial alliances. These unions gave rise to a mixed-race, bilingual, and bicultural offspring that quickly became indispensable to exchanges between Europeans and Africans.
This integration was neither accidental nor philanthropic. It followed a logic of securing commercial flows. By embedding themselves in local structures, the lançados obtained protection, information, and privileged access to inland markets. Peter Mark has shown that these Luso-African communities formed a true “forgotten diaspora,” occupying a key position in the formation of the Atlantic world.
The lançados did not merely trade luxury goods or exotic commodities. Their activities covered a broad spectrum: firearms, textiles, alcohol, spices; and very early on, human beings. They sometimes built their own vessels, recruited African auxiliaries (grumetes), and organized independent transport circuits.
Some sources indicate that, in certain areas, their communities became powerful enough to impose their will by force, without fear of immediate retaliation. This coercive capacity reminds us that their local integration did not prevent them from resorting to violence when their economic interests required it.
It is at this point that any romanticized reading of the lançados must be abandoned. Historiographical research converges on a clear conclusion: the lançados were full-fledged actors in the Atlantic slave trade. They purchased captives taken in regional conflicts, facilitated their concentration along the coast, and resold them to European traders—Portuguese, but also French, English, and Dutch from the sixteenth century onward.
In some cases, they themselves participated in organizing maritime transport. Their intermediary role helped to streamline a still fragile trade by linking African inland markets to transatlantic circuits. Without these local relays, the rapid expansion of the slave trade would have been materially impossible across vast stretches of the West African coast.
The General History of Africa published by UNESCO clearly emphasizes that the slave trade cannot be understood without taking into account these hybrid networks, situated at the junction of multiple economic and political worlds.
Over the course of the seventeenth century, the European population along the coast declined. The mixed-race descendants of the lançados became the majority and formed a local elite. They controlled ports, river routes, and commercial relations with the interior. Their power rested as much on their mastery of languages and customs as on their command of Atlantic networks.
This elite was not neutral. It benefited directly from the slave trade, which it helped to organize and secure. In certain regions of present-day Guinea-Bissau, these groups dominated the local economy until the eighteenth century, before being gradually marginalized by renewed Portuguese colonial control.
From the eighteenth century onward, imperial centralization intensified. The Portuguese Crown strengthened its direct administration, negotiated more systematically with African authorities, and sidelined autonomous networks. The lançados, absorbed into the colonial apparatus or relegated to secondary roles, lost their autonomy.
Their disappearance, however, did not erase their legacy. The commercial, social, and cultural structures they helped to build continued to exert a lasting influence on the Atlantic space.
The lançados occupy an uncomfortable place in history. They embody the complexity of a world in formation, where domination, collaboration, and violence were deeply intertwined. Rehabilitating them as objects of study does not mean glorifying or demonizing them, but restoring them to their proper place: that of decisive actors in the slave trade and in the first phase of globalization.
By studying them, the history of Africa and the Atlantic ceases to be a binary narrative opposing Europe and Africa. It reveals a deeper system, shaped by converging interests, compromises, and shared predation—a matrix whose consequences are still felt today.
Sources
UNESCO, General History of Africa, vol. V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, 2010.
Peter Mark, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Fernando Tabanez Ribeiro, Guiné-Bolama: história e memórias, Oeiras, 2018.
Summary
The lançados, or how Europeans settled in Africa structured the Atlantic slave trade
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