# Afro-Atlantic communities in the Bight of Benin  
Similar patterns of cross-cultural and social interactions developed in the Bight of Benin. There, the first contacts between Europeans and Africans dated from the 1500s, when Ijebu merchants sold ivory, pepper and locally produced cloth to the Portuguese (Law, 1991a, p. 118). Beads and enslaved Africans were later sold on the Gold Coast in exchange for gold or shipped to the Portuguese colony of Sao Tome and Principe. The Allada kingdom dominated this early trade, and by the 1620s it had become a major source of labour for Spanish America and particularly for the sugar plantations in northeast Brazil and Spanish America. Tellingly, Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval wrote a treatise (published in 1627) and noted a great number of Gbe speakers (from the Bight of Benin) in Cartagena de Indias.  
By the 1630s, the Allada kingdom had engaged in commerce with the Dutch, then seeking to obtain labour to develop sugar plantations in recently occupied land in Brazil. As the Dutch took on Portuguese possessions in Central Africa and Brazil, this trade was deeply influenced by events taking place elsewhere in the Atlantic. The Dutch takeover of Luanda, in Angola, prompted a decline of  
shipments of enslaved Africans from Allada. Later, the expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil and Sao Tome and Principe drove the Allada slave trade downwards. By the 1670s, however, the arrival of British and French traders had transformed Allada into the most important supplier in the Bight of Benin. In both cases, slave trade activities were dictated by the demand for labour in the Americas as both French and British sought to provide labour for colonies in the Caribbean, where sugar production was heavily dependent on enslaved labour (Law, 1991a, pp. 157-63; Law, 1994a, pp. 59-92).