# Diasporic Africans and the rise of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy  
Before the mid-fifteenth century, the economies of the Atlantic basin were unconnected; there was no common Atlantic market for their commodities and services. Only indirect connections existed between West Africa and Western Europe through Middle East and Northwest African merchants who traded West African gold for Western European textiles that they re-exported to West Africa in their trans-Saharan trade. The development of seaborne Atlantic trade between West Africa and Western Europe followed Portuguese exploration of West Africa's Atlantic coast in the middle decades of the fifteenth century (Blake, 1977; Vogt, 1979). The first half a century of Atlantic trade, 14501500, was virtually limited to Western Europe and West Africa. Gold was the dominant product in these early decades. An estimate put annual average Portuguese gold exports from West Africa at 450 kilograms in 1450-1520 (Dumett, 1998, pp. 2-3). Portuguese colonization of Atlantic islands off the coast of West Africa - Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé and Principe (particularly the latter, which produced for export over 2,800 tons of sugar per annum in the 1570s) (Hodges and Newitt 1988, p. 20) - also made West Africa the main source of sugar for Western European markets in these early decades. The linking of West Africa and Western Europe to the Americas, following the voyages of Christopher Columbus and the subsequent European colonization  
of the Americas ultimately prepared the foundation for the evolution of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.