Racist ideas about Africans spread through trade networks alongside enslaved people.

Evidence

Zurara circulated the manuscript of The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea to the royal court as well as to scholars, investors, and captains, who then read and circulated it throughout Portugal and Spain. Zurara died in Lisbon in 1474, but his ideas about slavery endured as the slave trade expanded. By the 1490s, Portuguese explorers had crept southward along the West African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. In their growing networks of ports, agents, ships, crews, and financiers, pioneering Portuguese slave-traders and explorers circulated the racist ideas in Zurara’s book faster and farther than the text itself had reached. The Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England. By the time German printer Valentim Fernandes published an abridged version of Zurara’s book in Lisbon in 1506, enslaved Africans—and racist ideas—had arrived in the Americas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 57

Categorization

• XREF: This supports Kendi’s core inversion: the slave trade’s self-interest created the circulation network that spread the justifying racist ideas — ideas as cargo moved by material infrastructure. Complements the diamond-bourse private-order networks (Opting out of the Legal System) as another case of institutions circulating reputation/ideology.