This talk will place the famous 1619 voyage to Virginia within the context of the larger Iberian (i.e. Spanish and Portuguese) world slave system of which it was essentially an extension. Indeed, one consequence of Iberian expansion from the fifteenth century onwards was that many of the already highly integrated regional markets in human beings of the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia and the Americas became loosely conjoined for the first time, creating an uneven and fragile, but nonetheless identifiable world market. This stretched across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, and linked the Iberian Peninsula to Africa and Asia through a network of port cities, such as Luanda, Mozambique, Goa, Malacca, Macau and Nagasaki. There, the trade crisscrossed cultural spheres with subtly different conceptions of “slavery” and “freedom” as both legal categories and lived experiences. These were, however, ultimately made commensurable in the act of buying and selling slaves (“the commensurability of commerce”). In this way, the project will show that while racialized slavery in North America took on a particular form, there were also parallels, overlaps and direct connections with slavery in large parts of the early modern world.