On two occasions the small archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese colony located in the Gulf of Guinea, played an important role in the history of tropical commercial agriculture. During the Age of Discoveries, in the sixteenth century, the islands became a major sugar-producer and the first plantation economy in the tropics. After some two centuries of economic decay, in the mid-nineteenth century, the archipelago emerged as Africa's first cocoa-producer and in the early twentieth century, for a few years, even became the world's largest cocoa-producer. This paper focuses on the first period which coincided with the settlement and colonization of the hitherto uninhabited tropical islands and seeks to put the rise and fall of São Tomé's early commercial agriculture in a wider social and political context.

As far as English-language secondary sources are concerned the article draws on the theses of the historian Robert Garfield on São Tomé's early history (1972, published 1992) and of the anthropologist Pablo Eyzaguirre on the island's plantation economy (1986). More recently, several Portuguese scholars have provided important additional insights into the archipelago's history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among these authors are the historians Arlindo Caldeira, particularly on the slave trade, slavery and slave resistance (1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008), Luís Pinheiro on economy and politics (2005), Pedro Cunha on the local economy (2001), and Cristina Serafim on the economic decline in the seventeenth century (2000).