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The Demography of Slavery in the Coffee Districts of Angola, c. 1800–70

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2021

Jelmer Vos Open the ORCID record for Jelmer Vos [Opens in a new window]  and
Paulo Teodoro de Matos Open the ORCID record for Paulo Teodoro de Matos [Opens in a new window]
Jelmer Vos
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Paulo Teodoro de Matos
Affiliation:
ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
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Abstract

This article uses demographic data from nineteenth-century Angola to evaluate, within a West Central African setting, the widely accepted theory that sub-Saharan Africa's integration within the Atlantic world through slave and commodity trading caused significant transformations in slavery in the subcontinent. It specifically questions, first, whether slaveholding became more dominant in Angola during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade; second, whether Angolan slave populations were predominantly female; and third, whether slavery in Angola expanded further during the cash crop revolution that accompanied the nineteenth-century suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Besides making a significant contribution to understanding the demographic context of slavery in the era of abolition, the article aims to display ways in which historians can use the population surveys the Portuguese Empire carried out in Africa from the late eighteenth century.

Keywords

AngolaWestern Africademographyslave tradeslaverymethodagriculture
Type
JAH Forum: Population Change and Demography in African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 213 - 234
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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4 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 1–23. Lovejoy later moved away from an emphasis on external trades to give more weight to internal markets to explain the dynamics of African slavery. For instance, see Lovejoy, P. E. and Richardson, D., ‘Competing markets for male and female slaves: prices in the interior of West Africa, 1780–1850’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 28:2 (1995), 261–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovejoy, P. E., ‘Islam, slavery, and political transformations in West Africa: constraints on the transatlantic slave trade’, Outre-mers, 89:336–7 (2002), 247–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a nonlinear approach to African slavery, see R. Dumett, ‘The work of slaves in the Akan and Adangme regions of Ghana in the nineteenth century’, in J. Spaulding and S. Beswick (eds.), African Systems of Slavery (Trenton, NJ, 2010), 65–90.

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7 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 160–84, 219–43, 267–80; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 142–3.

8 Austen, African Economic History, 95–102; Eltis, Economic Growth, 223–40. On the question of slave prices, Lovejoy and Richardson have presented counterevidence indicating that export prices varied geographically after abolition and that decline was mostly temporary. See P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘The initial “crisis of adaptation”: the impact of British abolition on the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa, 1808–1820’, in R. Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), 32–56; and P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘British abolition and its impact on slave prices along the Atlantic coast of Africa, 1783–1850’, The Journal of Economic History, 55:1 (1995), 98–119.

9 G. Austin, ‘Commercial agriculture and the ending of slave-trading and slavery in West Africa, 1780s–1920s’, in R. Law, S. Schwarz, and S. Strickrodt (eds.), Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge, UK, 2013), 259.

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15 For earlier examples of demographic history in Angola using similar data, see M. P. Candido, Fronteras de esclavización: Esclavitud, comercio e identidad en Benguela, 1780–1850 (Mexico City, 2011), 75–114, 118–53; Curto, J., ‘The anatomy of a demographic explosion: Luanda, 1844–1850’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 32:2/3 (1999), 381–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curto, J. and Gervais, R., ‘The population history of Luanda during the late Atlantic slave trade, 1781–1844’, African Economic History, 29 (2001), 1–59CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Heywood, L. and Thornton, J., ‘African fiscal systems as sources for demographic history: the case of central Angola, 1799–1920’, The Journal of African History, 29:2 (1988), 213–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Matos, P. T. and Vos, J., ‘Demografia e relações de trabalho em Angola c. 1800: um ensaio metodológico’, Diálogos, 17:3 (2013), 807–34Google Scholar; M. M. Mentz and G. A. Lopes, ‘A população do reino de Angola durante a era do tráfico de escravos: um exercício de estimativa e interpretação (c. 1700–1850)’, Revista de História, 177 (2018), https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2018.122490; Miller, Way of Death, 159–63; and Thornton, J., ‘The slave trade in eighteenth century Angola: effects on demographic structures’, Canadian Journal of Population Studies, 14:3 (1980), 417–27Google Scholar. For an example from Asia, see Walker, T., ‘Abolishing the slave trade in Portuguese India: documentary evidence of popular and official resistance to Crown policy, 1842–1860’, Slavery and Abolition, 25:2 (2004), 63–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 230.

18 Alden, D., ‘The population of Brazil in the late eighteenth century: a preliminary study’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 43:2 (1963), 173–205Google Scholar; M. L. Marcílio, La villle de São Paulo: Peuplement et population (Rouen, France, 1968).

19 J. Serrão and A. H. de Oliveira Marques (eds.), Nova história da expansão portuguesa (Lisboa, 1986–2006); A. Carreira, Demografia caboverdeana: Subsídios para o seu estudo, 1807/1983 (Praia, Cape Verde, 1985); C. A. Neves, São Tomé e Príncipe na segunda metade do século XVIII (Lisboa, 1989); A. do Vale, ‘A população de Macau na segunda metade do século XVIII’, in Centro de Estudos dos Povos e Culturas de Expressão Portuguesa (ed.), Portugal e o Oriente: Passado e presente, Povos e culturas, 5 (Lisboa, 1996), 241–54; A. Madeira, População e emigração nos Açores, 1766–1820 (Cascais, Portugal, 1999); M. de Jesus dos Mártires Lopes, Tradition and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century Goa (1750–1800) (New Delhi, 2006).

20 de Matos, P. T., ‘Counting Portuguese colonial populations, 1776–1875: a research note’, History of the Family, 21:2 (2016), 267–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Angola, general tables exist for 1777, 1778, and 1827, and they became the norm again after 1850. For the census history of Angola, see also Curto and Gervais, ‘Population history’, 4–12.

21 On the relation between slavery and race and other social categories in Angolan population counts, see R. Guedes, ‘Branco africano: notas de pesquisa sobre escravidão, tráfico de cativos e qualidades de cor no reino de Angola (Ambaca e Novo Redondo, finais do século XVIII)’, in R. Guedes (ed.), Dinâmica Imperial no Antigo Regime Português: Escravidão, governos, fronteiras, poderes, legados, séculos XVII–XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 2011); R. Guedes and C. S. Pontes, ‘Notícias do presídio de Caconda (1797): moradores, escravatura, tutores e órfãos’, in E. F. Paiva and V. Santos (eds.), África e Brasil no mundo moderno (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2013), 153–80.

22 A. P. Wagner, ‘Moçambique e o seu “diminuto número de habitantes”: recenseamentos da população da África Oriental Portuguesa no último quartel do século XVIII’, Diálogos, 11:1-2 (2007), 239–66. For more on the Mozambican population data, see A. P. Wagner, ‘População no Império Português: recenseamentos na África Oriental Portuguesa na segunda metade do século XVIII’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Universidade Federal do Paraná, 2009); and da Silva, F. R., ‘Counting people and homes in urban Mozambique in the 1820s: population structures and household size and composition’, African Economic History, 45:1 (2017), 46–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The Crown sent the first instructions to the governor of Angola in 1772. See Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (AHU), Conselho Ultramarino (CU) Angola, códice 472 (1772–1779), 50–4. For the table, see AHU CU Angola, Cx 61, doc. 81, ‘Mapa de todos os moradores e habitantes deste reino de Angola e suas conquistas tirado no fim do ano de 1777’.

24 Curto and Gervais, ‘Population history’, 17n42.

25 AHU CU Angola, Cx 156, doc. 16, ‘Mapa da população do reino de Angola, junho de 1827’.

26 AHU CU Angola, Cx 86, doc. 76, ‘Mapa do presídio das Pedras de Pungo-andongo, 1797’; Cx 109, doc. 37, ‘Mapa de Pungo-andongo, 1803’; Cx 112, doc. 47, ‘Mapa de Pungo-andongo, 1804’; Cx 119, doc. 6, ‘Mapa de Pungo-andongo, 1807’.

27 AHU CU Angola, Cx 115, doc. 28, ‘Mapa do presídio de S. José de Encoge, 1805’; Cx 168, doc. 2, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1830’.

28 Miller, Way of Death, 257, 260, 277, 523; D. B. D. da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (Cambridge, 2017).

29 Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter STDB), (https://slavevoyages.org/estimates/c6J3Fk3W), accessed 4 Apr. 2021. See also D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, 2010), 139–49, 278–81; and R. Ferreira, ‘The suppression of the slave trade and slave departures from Angola, 1830s–1860s’, in D. Eltis and D. Richardson (eds.), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, 2008), 313–34.

30 Harris, J. A. E., ‘Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–66’, Journal of Global History, 11 (2016), 409–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 V. Alexandre, Velho Brasil, novas Áfricas: Portugal e o Império (1808–1975) (Porto, Portugal, 2000); Ferreira, ‘Agricultural enterprise’; J. P. Marques, Os sons do silêncio: O Portugal de Oitocentos e a abolição do tráfico de escravos (Lisboa, 1999), 297–355; G. Paquette, ‘After Brazil: Portuguese debates on empire, c. 1820–1850’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 11:2 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2010.0005.

32 J. J. L. de Lima, Ensaios sobre a statística das possessões portuguezas, Volume III, Part I (Lisboa, 1844), 7. Authors’ translation. For an earlier articulation of the idea that the export slave trade extracted labour from productive activities in Africa, see J. C. F. C. de Castelo Branco e Torres, Memórias (Paris, 1825), 336. Torres was governor of Angola in 1816–19.

33 A. Pitcher, ‘Sowing the seeds of failure: early Portuguese cotton cultivation in Angola and Mozambique, 1820–1926’, The Journal of African History, 17:1 (1991), 43–70; Ferreira, ‘Agricultural enterprise’.

34 For export figures covering 1865–7, see The National Archives of the UK FO 84/1013, Gabriel to Clarendon, Luanda, 11 Feb. 1857, no. 11 (covering 1854–7); and Portugal, Relatórios do ministro e secretário d'estado dos negócios da marinha e ultramar (Lisboa, 1875), 56, (covering 1870–2).

35 J. Dias, ‘Changing patterns of power in the Luanda hinterland: the impact of trade and colonisation on the Mbundu ca. 1845–1920’, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 32 (1986), 285–318; Ferreira, ‘Agricultural enterprise’, 235–6.

36 Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas, 178; J. Mesquita, Dados estatísticos para o estudo das pautas de Angola (Luanda, 1918); C. F. Van Delden Laerne, Brazil and Java: Report on Coffee-Culture in America, Asia and Africa (London, 1885), 414–16.

37 On the use of slave labour in orchil production, see Candido, ‘Expansion of slavery’, 74, 83, 86.

38 Curto, ‘Anatomy’, 385; Lima, Ensaios, III, Part I (Lisboa, 1846), 4-A. Mentz and Lopes disagree with Curto about the source of Lopes de Lima's figures. See Mentz and Lopes, ‘População do reino’, 18.

39 Marques, J. P., ‘Uma cosmética demorada: as Cortes perante o problema da escravidão (1836–1875)’, Análise Social, 36:158–9 (2001), 209–47Google Scholar; Seixas, M., ‘Escravos e libertos no Boletim Oficial de Angola (1845–1875)’, E-Revista de Estudos Interculturais do CEI, 3 (2015)Google Scholar, http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/8369.

40 On the organisation of Angola's colonial districts, see C. Couto, Os capitães-mores em Angola no século XVIII (Luanda, 1972). On the censuses as tools of colonial control, see C. M. Santos, ‘Um governo “polido” para Angola: reconfigurar dispositivos de domínio (1750–c. 1800)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2005), 244–7.

41 From 1795, people enslaved by chiefs were officially recognised as slaves. A. Carreira, Angola: Da escravatura ao trabalho livre; Subsídios para a história demográfica do século XVI até à independência (Lisboa, 1977), 36.

42 D. D. da Silva, ‘The early population charts of Portuguese Angola, 1776–1830: a preliminary assessment’, Anais de História de Além-Mar, 16 (2015), 117–21. For comparison, see B. Fetter (ed.), Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era (London, 1990); B. Fetter, ‘Decoding and interpreting African census data: vital evidence from an unsavory witness’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 105–6 (1987), 83–105.

43 J.-B. Douville, Voyage au Congo at dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique équinoxiale, Volume I (Paris, 1832), 198.

44 AHU CU Angola, Cx 112, doc. 47, governador de Angola, Luanda, 28 Mar. 1805. On approximation in early European population counts, see D. S. Landes, ‘Statistics as a source for the history of economic development in Western Europe: the protostatistical era’, in V. R. Lorwin and J. M. Price (eds.), The Dimensions of the Past (New Haven, 1972), 53–91.

45 AHU CU Angola, Cx 86, doc. 76, ‘Mapa do presídio de Ambaca, 1797’.

46 J. Thornton, ‘Slave trade’, 418. For a fuller discussion of the problems underlying the Angolan population counts, see Curto and Gervais, ‘Population history’, 12–26. Demographers calculate the sex ratio of a population by dividing the number of males by the number of females and multiplying by 100.

47 AHU CU Angola, Cx 155, doc. 28, ‘Mapa do distrito do Golungo, 1806’.

48 Dias, J., ‘Famine and disease in the history of Angola, c. 1830–1930’, The Journal of African History, 22:3 (1981), 349–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Miller, J., ‘The significance of drought, disease and famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West-Central Africa’, The Journal of African History, 23:1 (1982), 17–61CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

49 AHU CU Angola, Cx 114, doc. 46, ‘Mapa do Golungo, 1805’. On tax flight, see also Cx 109, doc. 37, ‘Mapa do Golungo, 1803’.

50 AHU CU Angola, Cx 138, doc. 17, ‘Mapa do distrito do Dande, 1819’.

51 AHU CU Angola, Cx 124, doc. 39, ‘Mapa do Golungo, 1811’.

52 The administrators of Novo Redondo and Quilengues, supplying slaves to Benguela, were most explicit about this dynamic. AHU CU Angola, Cx 86, doc. 76, ‘Mapa do presídio de Novo Redondo, 1797’; Cx 93A, doc. 55, ‘Mapa de Novo Redondo, 1799’; Cx 165, doc. 57, ‘Mapa do presídio de Quilengues, 1830’.

53 Vansina, J., ‘Ambaca and the slave trade, c. 1760–1845’, The Journal of African History, 46:1 (2005), 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 R. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (New York, 2012), 33–6; J. C. Venâncio, A economia de Luanda e hinterland no século XVIII: Um estudo de sociologia histórica (Lisboa, 1996), 158–61.

55 Vansina, ‘Ambaca’, 13–14. On gender imbalance, see Miller, Way of Death, 159. Vansina's article does not mention the ‘transformation’ literature, but he was critical of ‘mode of production’ theories that informed Lovejoy's Transformations in Slavery. See J. Vansina, Living with Africa (Madison, 1994), 204–6. For a critique of Vansina's use of demographic data, see J. Curto, ‘The population history of the lower Kwanza valley, 1792–1796’, Ponta de Lança: Revista Electrônica de História, Memória e Cultura, 12:53 (2018), 110–11.

56 C. C. Robertson and M. A. Klein (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1997).

57 For data on the Luanda slave trade before 1850, see STDB, (https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/LdQssizx), accessed 2 Oct. 2019.

58 For a different view, based on local tax records from a much shorter period, see Curto, ‘Population history’, 106–7.

59 Candido, Fronteras de esclavización, 110, 112, 151–2; Curto and Gervais, ‘Population history’, 21–2, 58–9.

60 Guedes, ‘Branco africano’; Venâncio, Economia, 45–51, 57, 80–8, 103–4, 109. Miller argues that enslaved persons worked mainly, but not exclusively, in year-round occupations. See Miller, Way of Death, 270–3, 667–8.

61 Behrendt, S. D., ‘Markets, transaction cycles, and profits: merchant decision making in the British slave trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58:1 (2001), 171–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 R. Ferreira, Dos sertões ao atlântico: Tráfico ilegal de escravos e comércio lícito em Angola, 1830–1860 (Luanda, 2012), 24.

63 Birmingham, D., ‘The coffee barons of Cazengo’, The Journal of African History, 19:4 (1978), 523–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferreira, ‘Agricultural enterprise’; Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 230.

64 Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas, 174, 234; Dias, J., ‘White traders and colonial policy near the Kwanza: Kabuku Kambilo and the Portuguese, 1873–1896’, The Journal of African History, 17:2 (1986), 306Google Scholar. For prices, see Jacks, D. S., ‘From boom to bust: a typology of real commodity prices in the long run’, Cliometrica, 13:2 (2019), 202–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It must be noted that the increase in the numbers of libertos coincided with a decline in the size of the non-captive population. To some degree the rising proportion of libertos in the total population may have reflected outmigration by non-captives. Furthermore, the figure of 13,300 libertos in Golungo seems improbable; most settler plantations were in Cazengo, which is where we would expect a greater increase in the number of enslaved workers.

65 Ferreira, ‘Agricultural enterprise’, 237, 239. For the 1856 figure, see AHU SEMU-DGU, no. 638/2, ‘Nota demonstrativa do número de escravos registados na Província de Angola e suas dependências nos termos do Decreto de 14 de dezembro de 1854’.

66 J. E. Duffy, A Question of Slavery (Oxford, 1967), 34. For data on the Cuban slave trade from Angola, see STDB, (https://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/krfTDLKM), accessed 2 Apr. 2021.

67 Boletim do Governo de Angola, 7 (16 Feb. 1867), 76–7; Boletim do Governo de Angola, 42 (15 Oct. 1870), 596–7.

68 Birmingham, ‘Coffee barons’, 529; Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas, 178; Mesquita, Dados estatísticos.

69 M. A. de Castro Francina, ‘Itinerário de uma jornada de Loanda ao districto de Ambaca’, Annaes do Concelho Ultramarino, parte não oficial, série I, fevereiro de 1854 a dezembro de 1858 (Lisboa, 1854), 3–15.

70 AHU CU Angola, Cx 112, doc. 47, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1804’; Cx 114, doc. 46, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1805’; Cx 115, doc. 28, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1806’; Cx 119, doc. 6, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1807’. The sex ratio of the slave population of Encoge was remarkably high in a few years (1811, 1813, 1814, and 1851). These outlying data may be viewed with some scepticism, but there is no specific reason to question their accuracy compared to other data that fit closer to the norm.

71 AHU CU Angola, Cx 134, doc. 37, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1817’; Cx 136, doc. 19, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1818’; Cx 168, doc. 2, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1823’; Cx 141, doc. 49, ‘Mapa de Encoge, 1825’. Arquivo Histórico Militar, Lisbon (AHM), 2ª divisão, 2ª secção, Angola, Cx 1, doc. 22, ‘Mapa do presídio de São José de Encoge, 1821’.

72 Curto, ‘Anatomy’; V. Oliveira, ‘Donas, escravas e pretas livres em Luanda (séc. XIX)’, Estudos Ibero-Americanos, 44:3 (2018), 449, 452.

73 Secretaria do Governo Geral da Província de Angola, ‘Nota demonstrativa do número de escravos registados na província de Angola, e suas dependências, nos termos do Decreto de 14 de Dezembro de 1854’ (11 Feb. 1856), in Diário do Governo, 145 (21 June 1856), 854.

74 See Vos, J., Axelsson, P., and de Matos, P. T., ‘Introduction’, Anais de História de Além-Mar, 16 (2015), 11–18Google Scholar.

75 For example, see Candido, ‘Expansion of slavery’, 76–9; Curto and Gervais, ‘Population history’ 35–44; E. A. Salas, ‘Women and food production: agriculture, demography and access to land in late eighteenth-century Catumbela’, in M. P. Candido and A. Jones (eds.), African Women in the Atlantic World: Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660–1880 (Suffolk, 2019), 55–69.

76 H. Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a cultura do café (Lisboa, 1958), 91; Memorial ultramarino e marítimo (Lisboa, 1836), 35; Boletim Oficial do Governo da Província de São Tomé e Príncipe, 11 (13 March 1875), 92.

77 For example, see R. Guedes, ‘Senhoras pretas forras, seus escravos negros, seus forros mulatos e parentes sem qualidade de cor: uma história de racismo ou de escravidão? (Rio de Janeiro no limiar do século XVIII)’, in D. V. Demétrio, I. D. Santirocchi, and R. Guedes (eds.), Doze capítulos sobre escravizar gente e governar escravos: Brasil e Angola, séculos XVII–XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 2017), 17–50.