Beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, the development of sugar cane, cotton, and tobacco plantations in the New World led to an expansion of the slave trade. So from the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, slave trading became the center of Europe's trade with Africa. To use Samir Amin's expression, America became the European periphery, and Africa became the periphery of the American periphery. In this slaving era, the continent of Africa went through “one of the most massive processes of human transportation ever to have taken place by sea.” Throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries, Senegambia had been the main source of slaves. After that, it was superseded by other regions, especially the Gulf of Guinea and Angola. Still, on account of its geographical position, Senegambia continued to supply the sugar-growing islands on a permanent basis.

Senegambia, conquered by the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the British, expanded eastward toward the Sudan and northward toward Mauritania, thus bringing the Bambara states of the Niger Bend and the Moorish emirates of Chamama into the orbit of the Atlantic trade.