nations other than Portugal. More importantly, scholars must also seek to restore the place of African agency in the formation of Afro-Atlantic communities.  
As early as the sixteenth century, the Spanish colonization of the Americas drew extensively on transatlantic commercial and social ties with Senegambia and Central Africa (Angola and the Congo), anticipating the sociocultural dynamics that would later characterize the broader Afro-Atlantic world (Green, 2016; Wheat, 2016; Gómez, 2017; Schultz, 2016). Transatlantic ties underpinned the trajectories of Gold Coast African missionaries who helped spread Christianity in the Danish Caribbean (Sensbach, 2005; Simonsen, 2015). They also lay at the heart of the experience of two African nobles from Old Calabar who were swept by the slave trade into the British Atlantic world (Sparks, 2004; Sparks, 2014, pp. 1-3, 46-8). In the Dutch Atlantic, they facilitated the return to Elmina, in West Africa, of free Africans taken as slaves to Suriname in 1746 (Kok and Feinberg, 2016). In the French Atlantic, they are epitomized by the voluntary migration of Senegalese families to French Guiana, which challenged the deeply-entrenched racial structures of French colonialism (Traver, 2016).