The author embraces Uniformitarianism to re-examine whether creoles and pidgins emerged in an exceptional way and why there are so few pidgins lexified by European languages in coastal Africa where the earliest trade contacts between European mercantile companies and Indigenous rulers took place. Equally significant is the fact that no historian of the trade mentions usage of a Portuguese pidgin-cum-broken language, though it appears that Portuguese functioned as the default lingua franca from the coast of West Africa to coastal East Asia. Note also that no English pidgin emerged in India, the territory from which the British East India Company spread its activities to Southeast and East Asia. There are more English pidgins than those based on other European languages; and most English pidgins are in the South Pacific. An extensive review of how the trade between Europeans and non-Europeans operated, through brokers-cum-interpreters, reveals that pidgins emerged like creoles by basilectalization away from the lexifier and not sooner than the early nineteenth century. Comparisons with the emergence of more specifically the Romance languages also suggests that the latter evolved similarly to creoles and pidgins, by gradual divergence away from the lexifier, under substrate influence.