This edited collection has two broad objectives. One is to provide a comprehensive overview of the slave trade in the South Atlantic, here defined as an integrated commercial system. The other is to approach this subject from a cultural angle and to examine “the mixing of ideas, institutions and people across cultural boundaries” (p. 1) that took place during the slave trade. These cross-cultural exchanges supposedly resulted from, but also underpinned, commercial interactions in the South Atlantic. The book delivers on the first promise admirably, but less so on the second.
As the editors, David Richardson and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, explain in their introduction, slave trade circuits in the South Atlantic were integrated by distinct wind and ocean currents and the geographical proximity of Angola and Brazil, the two main poles of the system. While both regions were Portuguese colonies, from the seventeenth century the trade between their ports increasingly operated independently of metropolitan influence. On the African side of the Atlantic, Luanda gained ascendency in the late 1500s, although the slave trade quickly decentralized as traders began to concentrate in other ports, notably on the Loango Coast north of the Congo River and in Benguela south of Luanda. Altogether, these “Angolan” ports supplied about forty-five per cent of all enslaved Africans carried to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. “Angola” meant different things to different traders, however, which is one reason why historians tend to refer to this region as West Central Africa. For the Portuguese, Angola was the colony around Luanda, of which Benguela was a kind of dependency. Except for a brief period in the 1640s, when the Dutch West India Company controlled Luanda, these two ports were in Portuguese hands and mainly served the slave trade to Brazil. By contrast, British, Dutch, and French traders concentrated in ports north of Luanda, from where they carried slaves to the Caribbean region as well as to North America. Given this northern European input, the South Atlantic should, in fact, not be seen as a closed trade system.
Most chapters in this volume are overviews of specific geographies, covering a particular segment of the South Atlantic slave trade in a generalized fashion. Considering the book’s Atlantic focus, it is perhaps regrettable that only one chapter covers the American side of the slave trade. This is the contribution by Gustuvo Acioli Lopes, which examines the link between the production of export commodities in Brazil and slave imports from Africa in the country’s colonial era (pre-1822). As the slave trade in the South Atlantic was greatly dependent on developments in the Brazilian economy, this chapter provides a linchpin for the analyses of several other contributors as they examine the organization of the trade on the African coast, though, of course, not all slaves from West Central Africa went to Brazil.
The remainder of the book follows a chronological order. Thus, in chapter 3, Filipa da Silva looks at private businessmen in the Dutch “Angolan” trade from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, using records from the Amsterdam notarial archives. These businessmen include traders who operated outside the state-sponsored West India Companies as well as merchant bankers, who played an important role in the financing, insuring, and the commercial organization of private slaving voyages. Next, Arlindo Caldeira reviews the slave trade in seventeenth-century Angola, discussing the acquisition of slaves in the interior as well as their accommodation and embarkation at the coast. He also assesses some of the technical, financial, and logistical aspects of the shipping of slaves. In chapter 5, Mariana Candido analyses trade networks in Benguela and its hinterland between 1700 and 1850, focusing in particular on the trade routes between the coast and the interior and the different commercial groups that sustained them. Chapter 6, on Mozambique in the eighteenth century, was written by the late José Capela, to whom this volume is dedicated. Curiously, only the second half of the chapter deals with the slave trade to the Atlantic, especially Spanish America and the French Antilles, while the first part describes the trade from Mozambique to Indian Ocean ports without making entirely clear how the later Atlantic component grew out of this earlier trade.
Chapter 7 brings the reader back to the Atlantic rim, as Stacey Sommerdyk examines the commercial exchanges between Dutch slave traders and individual brokers at Malemba, on the Loango Coast. Using the account books of one Middelburg vessel that made several slaving voyages to the Loango Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century, Sommerdyk’s chapter stands out for placing African traders at the heart of her analysis. In the final chapter, Roquinaldo Ferreira explores the geopolitical dimensions of Portuguese efforts to suppress the slave trade in Angola after 1830. Ferreira couples his mastery of the archival record to a transatlantic perspective to show how British political pressure, Brazilian and other commercial interests, and Portuguese claims to sovereignty affected the course of abolition in West Central Africa.
With the exception of Ferreira’s, the chapters in this volume are generally descriptive, presenting original archival research, much of which was carried out in Dutch- and Portuguese-language archives. Although the chapters rarely offer novel arguments, the book helps readers unfamiliar with the literature on the South Atlantic slave trade to get a quick sense of its basic organization, both on the European and the African side. The wide range of sources can be used to study different aspects of this important Central African branch of the transatlantic slave trade.
However, only some chapters explain how trade was conducted across cultural boundaries and then broach this question only in passing. For example, in his discussion of the Angolan slave trade, Arlindo Caldeira devotes three pages to coastal traders known as pombeiros, who played a crucial role in connecting interior markets to the global economy. Likewise, Mariana Candido’s chapter has one section on the position of women of mixed Portuguese and African descent, the so-called donas, and their local offspring in the Angolan economy, a subject that she dominates like few others. Analysing the slave trade from Mozambique, José Capela makes the point that Swahili merchants were fundamental to the creation of internal slave networks, “linking traditional chiefdoms to the coast” (p. 187), but he lets a chance to expand on this fascinating topic slip. It seems quite obvious that groups like the pombeiros, the donas, and even the Swahili were critical to the expansion of Atlantic commerce in Africa as they were important bridge builders between European and African worlds. Other chapters examine the activities of traders, merchant bankers, ship captains, and other players in the European and Brazilian slave trade, but we are rarely offered more than a glimpse of how they navigated different economic and political cultures, created partnerships with African suppliers and consumers, and by doing so extended their commercial networks into Africa.
In short, the research brought together in this volume is strong and will contribute to the growing literature on the slave trade in the South Atlantic, but it leaves the reader wanting to know more about the transcultural exchanges in this region and era.
