This article aims to analyse some of the multilateral flows of capital that contributed to weaving a Global South during the second half of the eighteenth century. It specifically revisits the functioning and financing of the Portuguese slave trade from a global perspective, and offers insights for assessing older frameworks that explain it, in either triangular or bilateral terms. The article argues that the Portuguese slave traffic should be liberated from the South Atlantic borders to which it has been confined. In so doing, it offers an Atlantic history in a global perspective, disclosing the connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Putting the financing of the slave trade into a larger global perspective helps to more accurately explain how it actually operated in terms of the organization of trade. When the financial and institutional foundations of Asian and African trade are analysed together, it becomes evident that they were part of larger networks and capital flows, both westwards and eastwards, which were not just framed imperially or locally.

Several burials excavated during 1960 at Ingombe Ilede in southern Africa were accompanied by exceptional quantities of gold and glass beads, bronze trade wire and bangles. The burials were indirectly dated to the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries AD, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese on the East Coast of Africa. New AMS dates on cotton fabric from two of the burials now relocate them in the sixteenth century. This was a dynamic period when the Portuguese were establishing market settlements along the Zambezi, generating new demands for trade products from the interior, and establishing trade networks with the Mwene Mutapa confederacy. These new dates invite a reconsideration of Ingombe Ilede's relationship to Swahili and Portuguese trade in the middle Zambezi. This article is followed by four responses and a final comment by the authors.