D aniel B. D omingues da S ilva . The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867

From 1514 to 1866, West Central Africa, today Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, supplied two out of every five enslaved Africans—nearly five million people—to markets in the Americas, principally Brazil. Half of that commerce occurred from 1780 to 1867, the period covered by Daniel B. Domingues da Silva in The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, an impressive study that draws upon archival material in Portugal, Angola, and Brazil and information contained in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org). In the seventy years between 1780 and the abolition of the slave trade to Brazil in 1850, traders in Luanda, under Portuguese control, forcibly embarked almost one million enslaved individuals. An additional five hundred thousand individuals were embarked from Benguela, 340 miles south of Luanda. The slave trade from West Central Africa peaked in 1846–1850 as Brazilian abolition loomed and the demand for slaves increased. In relating his revised scale of West Central Africa’s export slave trade to Brazilian developments, Domingues da Silva argues that scholars need to rebalance the interplay between African slave supply and demand in the Americas toward demand. Slave imports to Brazil burgeoned after 1780 as Brazilian commercial agriculture expanded to meet rising domestic and overseas demand for sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and foodstuffs such as beef, corn, and rice. Lancashire manufacturers’ need for cotton outpaced British West Indian supplies; Brazilian cotton shipped to Liverpool first via Lisbon, and then after 1808 on British ships that loaded in Brazilian ports. Slave-produced Brazilian rice fed the growing domestic and Portuguese markets. The St. Domingue slave revolt in 1791, which started the Haitian Revolution, destroyed many plantations and removed the world’s major coffee and sugar producer. Brazilian entrepreneurs subsequently developed new lands for cash crops in the São Paulo region and Minas Gerais, several hundred kilometers from the coast.

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