Admin, Journal Manager, 1138-4392-1-CE
Admin, Journal Manager, 1138-4392-1-CE
Introduction
The Ethiopic Ocean — History
and Historiography, 1600-1975
abstract: Atlantic history is generally surveyed through the prism of the North
Atlantic. Yet the South Atlantic had a distinct historical pattern through the Sailing
Age. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps and nautical guides, taking into ac-
count the system of currents and winds under the meteorological equator, which is
on the north side of the geometrical equator, called the southern part of the Atlan-
tic the "Ethiopic Ocean/'This term helps to emphasize the singularity, the boundar-
ies, and the periodization of South Atlantic history. Indeed, generations of missiolo-
gist, colonial, and self-taught authors, as well as great and less great historians,
researched such subjects.Their works depict a genealogy of the South Atlantic World
that leads to a more diversified and perhaps more conclusive Atlantic history.
trade
The Atlantic, “a space which borrowed its past and was hastily constructed”
cal and historical network that stood within this geographical space for three
hundred years. In modern atlases and charts, the subequatorial seas of western
2
and eastern Africa bore the name of Oceanus Ethiopicus. Later maps, like the
influential Willem Blaeu’s 1606-1638 charts, assigned a different name for the
eastern African seas. Thus, the Southern Atlantic remained the Oceanus Ethio-
i
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
picus, as the eastern African seas were renamed Mar de India and, later, Indian
Ocean. 3
Over the Transatlantic Sailing Age routes followed currents generated by the
South Atlantic Gyre, combining the westerly and southeasterly trade winds.
Overreaching the geographical equator, this nautical system has its northeast-
ern limits between 5 degrees and 10 degrees N. Such perimeters overlap the
northern summer edge of the southeasterly trade winds and the Intertropical
4
the thermal and atmospheric division between the North and South Atlantic.
maps embrace the sub-Saharan coast south of Senegambia into the South At-
lantic Ocean. 5 Another chart, John Senex’s A Neiu Map, or Chart in Mercator’s Pro-
own right, different from either the geographical division below the equator’s
line or the North Atlantic. Most significantly, The American Cyclopaedia (1 873) des-
7
ignates the North Atlantic as the “Atlantic proper.” Some maps and guides
plainly depicted two different Atlantic systems matching the two wheels of
currents.
Why did the name Ethiopic Ocean encompass the greater part of the Atlan-
tic? Why are such name and maritime boundaries mostly drawn in English and
the weather edges and currents variations around the equator. Vessels from
Newport, Liverpool, or Nantes carrying enslaved from the Bight of Benin or the
Bight of Biafra to the Caribbean crossed the doldrums twice, and there were
higher mortality rates in the Middle Passage. 8
Anglo-American whaling voyages through the North and South Atlantic also
provided sailing evidence on the two Atlantic current’s system to the mapmak-
ers and nautical guides. 9 Beyond a common knowledge of the Atlantic, whaling
and slave-trading ships and crews sometimes mingled in nineteenth-century
10
Brazilian and Cuban ports.
2
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
More than any other seafaring sailing activity, the migratory whaling de-
Such circumstances may well explain the definition of the outsized northern
limits of the Southern or Ethiopic Ocean depicted in the American and British
nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, Portuguese, Luso-Brazilian, and Luso-African seamen acquired
intimate knowledge of routes between Brazil and Africa. Indeed, the presence
Brazilian slave trade that expanded over sub-Saharan ports. 14 Adding to the
Senegambia and Gulf of Guinea shores, Luanda evolved into a significant slav-
ing port as the Asiento de Negros found its way in West Central Africa at the turn
of the seventeenth century.
Bilateral trade from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco to Angola and,
later, the Gulf of Guinea extended between the equator and the Tropic of Capri-
corn. From southward, a portion of the Potosf’s silver and, later, tin exports
sailed through Buenos Aires toward Brazilian ports. Paired with the African slave
15
trade, those southward exchanges continued, legally or illegally, until 1850. In
the second half of the eighteenth century, the Amazon ports of Sao Luis and
trade was “atlanticized” as it was driven to Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the nine-
teenth century. These four main merchant networks generated around fifteen
thousand round trips from Brazilian ports to Africa from 1550 through 1850. 16
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors such as the French navigator Py-
rard, the Portuguese friar Vicente do Salvador, and the planter and merchant
Ambrosio Fernandes Brandao reported the routes linking Brazilian ports to An-
17
gola. However, accurate nautical descriptions of such travels are uncommon.
In his Rutter [Roteiro], written during the Iberian Union, the royal cosmographer
3
4
5
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Antonio Mariz de Carneiro, like Manoel de Figueiredo before him, describes the
sailing between Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and the Rio de La Plata as standard voy-
ages. Yet neither cosmographer mentioned the existing bilateral crossing from
Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro, and occasionally Buenos Aires, to An-
18
gola. Surely heuristic knowledge played a key role in the Atlantic World, where
navigation was simpler than the round trip between Portugal and India, which
19
covered eighteen thousand to twenty thousand miles in different seas.
Notwithstanding, the first known description of the south-south routes, by
Jose Antonio Caldas, appeared in 1759. A cartographer and engineer born and
raised in Salvador de Bahia, Caldas sojourned at Sao Tome Island and sailed back
and forth from Bahia to the Gulf of Guinea registering nautical information. 20
In 1802 another Luso-Brazilian cartographer, Jose Fernandes Portugal, published
a South Atlantic map detailing nautical parameters from the Brazilian ports to
the Rio de la Plata and the ports of Benguela and Luanda. 21 Not until 1832
much later than the studies on North Atlantic seafaring —did the full description
22
and maps of the South Atlantic surface currents by James Rennell come out.
exchanges obscured their framework. The same can be said for the Africans
illegally carried to the Rio de la Plata. As Eltis and Davidson observed, the South
Atlantic exchanges, which form the larger slave-trading network, are the less
23
well known by Atlantic historians.
In fact, from 1556 until 1850, Atlantic South America, including Brazilian
and Rio de la Plata ports, received 4,970,000 enslaved people, mostly carried
under Portuguese and Brazilian-flagged ships. Brazil was the main destination
of enslaved in the Americas: 4,864,000 Africans, 43 percent of all the Atlantic
24
slave trade, disembarked there. The longest and most intense forced migra-
tion of the modern era took place below the equator.
As noted earlier, another key difference between the North Atlantic and the
South Atlantic is the bilateral trade prevailing between Africa and Brazilian ports
and, to a lesser extent, Rio de la Plata ports. As a result, 95 percent of the ships
carrying Africans to Brazil left Brazil’s ports loaded with locally produced or
reexported European and Asian goods. As Eltis and Richardson have shown,
between 1501 and 1867 more slaving trade voyages were organized in Rio de
25
Janeiro and Bahia than in any other port in the Atlantic.
Brazilian ports shipped cassava flour and cowry to Angola and Congo begin-
ning around the end of the sixteenth century. 26 Through Rio de Janeiro or di-
6
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
rectly from Buenos Aires, the Potosi silver arrived into the hands of slave mer-
chants in Luanda. In the second half of the seventeenth century sugarcane rum
(called jeribita in Angola and cachaga in Brazil) started to be dispatched to West
27
Central Africa and occasionally to the Slave Coast. In practice, exports of Per-
nambuco and Bahia tobacco outweighed exchanges with the Gulf of Guinea,
and specifically with the Slave Coast, from the 1670s onward. 28 Together, Bra-
zilian exports of jeribita and tobacco purchased around 48 percent of the
2,587,937 Africans who disembarked in Brazil between 1701 and 1810. 29 Taking
into account an unknown quantity of horses, leather, manioc, maize, sugar, and
dried and cured meats and fish exported to African ports, as well as the smug-
gling of eighteenth-century gold and diamonds, Brazilian goods arguably ac-
30
quired more than half of the Africans introduced into Portuguese America.
and longer routes to the Angolan coast made vessels from western and northern
Europe sail generally to alternate ports northward, toward the Congo estuary
and beyond.
Praising such meteorological determinants, the prominent lesuit mission-
ary and diplomat Antonio Vieira interpreted the easy sailing between Brazil and
Angola as a demonstration of the divine will — or, in other words, as the sense of
“Some great mystery exists in this transmigration, ... so singularly favored and
assisted by God, for [the voyages] . . . that pull those people from their coun-
tries to bring them to the practices of the captivity, are always with stern wind
and without changing tack.” Like other Portuguese officials and missionaries
of his time, Father Vieira justified the slave traffic as a stage in their evangeliza-
tion. Once extracted from hostile and heathen African villages, the enslaved
could be converted and their souls saved in the colonial enclaves of Portuguese
America. 31
Why emphasize Fr. Antonio Vieira’s role? First, his sermons and political
writings had a long-lasting influence. Like many other authors, Charles Boxer
maintains that Vieira “was certainly the most remarkable man in the seven-
slave trade and black slavery is critical insofar as they were the only missionaries
continuously present in Angola, from the last quarter of the sixteenth century
until their expulsion from Portugal in 1759, adding to the great influence they
7
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
exerted in Brazil during the same period. Therefore the Jesuits formed the core
of the South Atlantic slave system. They were missionaries and slave owners
on both shores of the ocean. It was up to them to morally validate the African’s
1527), Antonio Sanchez (1641), and Costa Miranda (1681) depict two major il-
lustrations: the fortress of Sao Jorge de Mina, built by the Portuguese in 1482
(Elmina, taken by the Dutch in 1637), a chief trade center of an area that was one
of the main sources of the gold imported in Europe from 1500 to 1700, and the
“church of Manicongo,” in Sao Salvador do Congo, which was, beginning in
33
1596, the bishopric seat of the Congo and Angola diocese. These were strong
symbols of the Iberian overseas. Indeed, Sao Jorge da Mina’s fortress was the
first European trading post in the sub-Saharan world, as Sao Salvador do Congo
was the first episcopal see in continental Africa since the Muslim conquest of
North Africa.
Decisive events in the last decades of the eighteenth century and beginning
of the nineteenth —the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Napo-
leonic Wars, and the Ibero-American colonies’ emancipation —had rather dif-
Luanda retained second place in Brazil’s foreign exchanges. Despite the post-
Vienna balance of power and the encroachment of the Royal Navy in the south-
south trade, the Ethiopic Ocean’s historical context remains relevant until the
middle of the nineteenth century as an essential trait of the Brazilian state build-
ing among the new American countries.
From 1808 until 1850, Brazil fostered the Atlantic slave trade in African ports
forsaken by American and British vessels, drew the Mozambican trade into the
Atlantic, and supported African inland traffic with reexported European merchan-
dise. Stimulated by British finance and manufactured exports, Brazil demon-
8
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Aiencastro
embrace and thrive across all sub-Saharan trading areas, sustaining a predatory
economy on both shores of the South Atlantic. In the end, the Brazilian Crown
invigorated slavery in its entire national territory and protected its slave traders
with diplomats from a European-bred monarchy apt to defer the Foreign Office
and Royal Navy’s interventionism in the South Atlantic.
By doing so, the 1822 Brazilian independence thwarted the abolitionist and
Republican principles aroused by the American, French, and Haitian Revolu-
tions and thus embodied a genuine Atlantic counterrevolution. 35
Subsequently, the close of the South Atlantic network generated a defining
trading areas such as the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic
bilateral exchanges did not unravel progressively in the face of new competitors
or resume with different commodities. Rather, these maritime exchanges broke
down abruptly and vanished under British diplomatic and naval coercion. From
then onward, “Ethiopic Ocean” turned into an outdated name as the new inter-
Thenceforth, alluding to the South Atlantic emptiness after the end of the
slave trade, a famed British nautical guide states in a 1883 introductory note
absent from its previous editions: “A large portion of the coast lying within the
Southern tropics, and the absolutely barren nature of its eastern side, render
the commerce in this vast area of water of very small importance compared with
other seas of equal magnitude.” 36
One century later, in the aftermath of African’s countries decolonization, in
and academics, now ponder the present and the future of the South Atlantic,
underlining the distinctions between the two hemispheres. A recent joint report
from the World Bank and the Institute for Applied Economic Research, a Brazil-
ian agency, describes the South Atlantic “as a channel of cultural transfers or
political and social experiences, rather than as a geopolitical ocean like the North
Atlantic” —an arguable description.
37
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
nineteenth centuries as the “Ethiopic Ocean,” I shall utilize that term to design
39
this geohistorical aggregate .
nial era. Therefore, except for some essays related to Atlantic history, this article
^ 975 -
Noting the growing academic trend toward Atlantic history, David Armitage
observed rather ironically, “We are all Atlanticists now.” Going back in time,
John Russell-Wood mentioned historians who “unconsciously or not” studied
40
the subject .
to area studies only incidentally quoted the need to include Brazil and Afro-
42
Brazilians in such research .
10
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
holds that the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean, subsumes the entire At-
lantic history —a postulation that derives from nineteenth-century theories on
merchant capital regarding England and the British empire as the overcomer of
national and colonial stages previously performed by other European countries.
over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the
the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.” 43
For his part, Max Weber created his own chronological and categorical dis-
tinction among the modern colonial powers, regarding the Portuguese and the
Spanish colonial systems as related to the “feudal type” while their Dutch and
44
the English counterparts were otherwise “capitalistic.”
far as the historiography emphasizes the 1807 English and American Abolition
Acts. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and his appraisals of the
“triangular trade” —a characterization he contributed to promoting — as well
decades has research provided evidence that beyond the North Atlantic —the
“Atlantic proper” —the South Atlantic network also existed.
45
In any case, with
the “Williams debate” as its counterpart, the “Drescher debate” centers on the
North Atlantic and consigns the nineteenth-century South Atlantic slave trade to
secondary-issue status.
Several circumstances overshadowed the South Atlantic’s geohistorical spec-
ificity. First, there is of course the historical namesake above the equator de-
scribing the us southern states that is the standard reference to the term at the
46
Library of Congress. Thus concerning the southern United States and Jamai-
can slave societies as well as their spatial economic specialization, Philip Curtin
elaborated in 1955 the first conceptual framing of a historical “South Atlantic
47
system.” Later Curtin abandoned this concept, proposing the notion of “plan-
tation complex” to encompass the tropical slavery regions north and south of
48
the equator.
11
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Yet two essential albeit divergent books on Atlantic history, Bernard Bailyn’s
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005) and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993),
omit the South Atlantic network in the same way, focusing on the Northern
African history, and the deportation of Africans to the Americas. 51 His single
Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) cast a new light on Atlantic history centered
on African American cultures. However, the book focuses equally on the North
Atlantic and Caribbean societies and makes no reference to Africa. Although
Gilroy highlights the idea of the black diaspora, he does not mention Afro-
Brazilians, the largest national community of African descent outside Africa. In
It must be said that Gilroy in some way acknowledges this oversight. In the
preface to the Brazilian translation of his book, he notes that African Brazil’s
56
history has been “marginalized” in the literature on African American culture.
12
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Communities and countries below the equator are surveyed in some collec-
compassing the American colonial period, the chapters overlook the Mozam-
bican traffic to Brazil — a new segment of the Atlantic slave trade —and other
long-lasting transformations of the first half of the nineteenth century, when
the Cuban and Brazilian slave trade reached their zenith. While Luso-Brazilians
surpassed all other Atlantic slave traders, Luanda turned into the most promi-
nent enslaver embarkation port in Africa, and Rio de Janeiro emerged as the
main slave trade hub in the Americas.
Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan edited another compelling book on the
field, encompassing a larger period: 1450-1850. 58 This collective work under-
plays interactions between Angola and Brazil as well as the role of Portuguese
asentistas in the consolidation of Lisbon’s presence in West Central Africa. Some
chapters develop an interesting global approach. Yet the chapter on Atlantic
Warfare (Ira D. Gruber) does not comment on the South Atlantic Luso-Dutch
war or the expeditionary troops from Brazil who fought in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Angola. Kenneth Mills studies religion, omitting the pluri-
centennial Catholic missions and religious culture in the Kongo kingdom and
Angola. J.-F. Schaub’s chapter on violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies scarcely cites Africa and eschews the violence generated by the Atlantic
slave trade. In the same vein, Schaub’s acknowledgment to Father Vieira’s plea
for the Amerindians does not see the other side of the coin: Fr. Vieira’s staunch
support of the slave trade and the deportation of the Angolans. Robin Fox ad-
dresses the topic of Africa and the Atlantic World, focusing chiefly on the Gulf
of Guinea but too briefly on West Central Africa, the main deportation’s area.
The complete survey of David Eltis on slavery and the slave trade unfortunately
the us South, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Cuban plantations and the slave trade
cut events brought about or performed in the Ethiopic Ocean by the Royal Navy
at that time: the end of the Brazilian slave trade (1850), the bombing of Lagos
61
(1851), and the blockade of Ouidah (1852). The combined effects of those ep-
isodes sharply marked Atlantic history. Between 1841-1850 and 1851-1860, the
deportation of Africans to the Americas decreased by two-thirds, and this fall
is South Atlantic history dissimilar from North Atlantic history? The answer is
yes, definitely.
toriography on the field, before Atlantic history became a scholarly area in its
own right.
Brazil and Angola through the Thirty Years War and beyond; the Portuguese
Restoration diplomacy; the refocusing of the Braganza dynasty’s overseas pol-
icy from Asia to the Atlantic; the Jesuits’ activities in the Atlantic; the Paulista
the introduction of South American crops (most notably, maize and cassava) in
14
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
the overthrow of the Ndongo kingdom; the decline of the Kongo kingdom and the
emergence of the Lunda and Luba States; the rise of the Dahomey kingdom;
the displacements of the Spanish slave asientos’ networks southward to Luanda
andPotosi through Buenos Aires; and, finally, the doctrinaire legitimation of the
Atlantic slave trade by the clergy and missionaries of Brazil and Angola.
Throughout the Iberian Union, the Portuguese slave traders, ship-owners,
prominent merchants, and their Spanish partners acquired all of the asientos
auctioned in Madrid from 1595 to 1640. In the process, they added the Spanish
American slave market to the management they already wielded on the Brazilian
market. Additionally, the asentistas’ investments broadened the Portuguese do-
minion in West Central Africa. Settlements and forts in Benguela, Luanda, Mu-
xima, Massangano, and Cambambe were built or reinforced through the asiento
Angola ports and inland markets, helping to curb the Dutch and, later, French
trade to the Soyo County and the Loango kingdom, at the mouth of the Congo
River. As a result, the combined spaces of the Ethiopic Ocean frame its histori-
cal outline. Typically, Africanists and Americanists singly study crucial and cor-
related issues of the South Atlantic.
guese) and overlook the rising slave demand from the asentistas’ agents newly
64
settled in Luanda. Conversely, examining the shifting from Indian slavery to
in Angola. 65
From this same territorial perspective, Americanists often analyze the debate
on the enslaved African status began when they landed in America. As a matter
of fact, the acceptance of the enslaving and trading of Africans predates the dis-
covery of America.
Proposed by the Portuguese Crown and issued by Pope Nicholas V, the bull
Romanus Pontifex (1455) set the legal basis of the Atlantic slave trade. 66 Later, es-
the Asientos de Negros gave new dimensions to the lawfulness of the African’s
15
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Church authorities before him, envisioned the African slave trade as a process
for converting the heathen deportees into Catholics within the colonial enclaves
in America. Bought at inland markets, branded with the owner’s seal after the
payment of the Crown’s fee in Luanda and West African ports, drawn away from
Africa’s paganism, and sold to Christian masters, the enslaved was already half-
way toward heaven on his arrival in Catholic America. Therefore the problem
of the legitimacy of blacks’ slavery became a subsidiary and sometimes indis-
cernible element in Ibero-America.
trade to Luanda and other Africans ports as well as the expansion and the legit-
imacy of the African slavery in South America. However, the South Atlantic per-
spective offers a more comprehensive approach that prevents pitfalls of disci-
On the geopolitical viewpoint, stages of the Dutch West India Company (wic)
operations on both shores of the Atlantic (1630-1654) displayed the unified
economic space shaped within the Ethiopic Ocean. The Dutch first occupied
the Portuguese sugarcane plantations in Pernambuco (1630), Brazil, and then
decided to capture Angola (1641). The other way around, the Portuguese and
Brazil’s settlers first recaptured Angola (1648) to undermine and expel the wic
from Brazil (1654). The outcomes of the world economic war between Portugal
and the United Provinces are thus clear. Across the Pacific, over the Spice War,
where factories’ control was at stake, Lisbon had lost. In the South Atlantic, over
African slave trade areas, thanks to her control over Angolan inland networks,
Lisbon had won. Henceforth, the center of the Portuguese overseas shifted from
the Pacific to the Atlantic, from an economy of circulation to an economy of
production more related to territorial control.
of new markets on the Slave Coast raised African deportation to Brazil and im-
the south Atlantic, past and present Lutz Felipe de Alencastro
pacted the Indian territories in the Northeast. Turning into a less significant re-
serve of captive labor, Indian villages appeared as a hindrance to the cattle-raising
expansion. From then on, with the support of the Paulistas from southern Bra-
zil and militiamen from the North recruited by planters and ranchers, a war was
waged against the northeastern Indians, from the Bahia backhands up to the Am-
azon’s south bank. Troops and officers who had previously fought in Angola or
in the Brasflica War against the Dutch often raided Indians and Maroon villages
in northeastern Brazil, particularly during the thirty or so expeditions launched
against Palmares from 1654 until 1694. Some of these officers and militiamen re-
turned later to Angola. Back and forth across Brazil and Angola hinterlands, such
military propagate a common knowledge on wars waged around the Tropic of
67
Capricorn, forming therefore a new colonial army in the South Atlantic.
the northeastern Indians marked a rupture in Portuguese America. For the first
time, the colonial offensive aimed the extermination rather than the enslave-
68
ment of the Indians. Therefore the African slave trade extension had dramatic
consequences to the Indian communities as well.
By that time, two major transformations occurred in the Atlantic. In the north-
ern Atlantic, aside from Lisbon and Seville, new organizational centers of the
slave trade had arisen in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Nantes. 69 In the south-
ern Atlantic, a bilateral trade consolidated between Brazil and African ports in
pin the South Atlantic network. Following the maritime currents and exchanges,
the new bishopric ofMaranhao (North Brazil) was made suffragan of the Lis-
Moreover, under the Crown’s and metropolitan merchants’ direction, a new slave
trade circuit was created between Guinea-Bissau and the Portuguese Amazon
74
seaports of Belem and Sao Luis.
West Central Africa. Many sources and essays on Congo and Angola discussed
below derived from colonial and missionary authors. Referring to the Kongo
kingdom, for which there was sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European docu-
mentation he aptly considered “richer . . . than for any other state in Africa,”
Richard Gray stated: “The value of this material is, however, vitiated by its alien
nature and there does not seem much likelihood of oral tradition greatly reme-
tugues, held in Lisbon. Gathering historians and social scientists from different
18
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
countries when Europe’s balance of power was being shaken by the Second
World War, the conference centered around the idea of the legitimacy and en-
76
durance of the Portuguese colonial possessions. In the meantime, the Agenda
Geral das Colonias subsidized books and research journals on Portugal’s over-
77
seas history. Revealing debates, whose influence on later books on Atlantic his-
tory has been underestimated, occurred around those two commemorations. 78
Edgar Prestage’s publications on seventeenth-century Portugal’s diplomatic
history and Hermann Watjen’s book on Dutch colonization in Brazil completed
79
the works of several Portuguese and Brazilian historians. Prestage, who later
European expansion. As is known, the wic had many Germans beside the
Dutch in its settlements in Brazil and Angola, not to mention Johan Moritz von
80
Nassau-Siegen, the Westphalian governor of New Holland.
Some of the Portuguese authors writing on the Atlantic —such as Joao Lucio
de Azevedo, Serafim Leite, Jaime Cortesao, Edmundo Correia Lopes, and Ruela
Pombo — lived in Brazil and interacted with Brazilian historians and institu-
The Jesuit Serafim Leite focused his research on the missionaries in Portu-
guese America. A central idea underlines his works: the protection and spiritual
redemption of the Indians by the Jesuits was the greatest accomplishment of the
Portuguese in Brazil. 82
The Christian humanity toward the Indians, epitomized by the Jesuits, over-
rode the Atlantic slave trade and other tragedies caused by Lisbon’s colonial-
ism. Aiming Portuguese and Brazilian readers, his Historia attempts to join both
deirantes had a double impact. Interpreting the Paulistas’ slaving raids on Para-
guayan Indian missions as attacks against the Spanish power in South America,
Cortesao inscribed the bandeiras in the celebrated Restoration Wars, flattering
the same Sao Paulo’s oligarchies that had favored his publications. By doing
so, he also underlined the extent of the connections between southern Brazil,
Paraguay, and Rio de la Plata. Though Cortesao had not studied the American
nexuses with Africa, his envisioning of the global Portuguese overseas and his
larger approach to Iberian America contributed to the depiction of the South
83
Atlantic history.
Brazil from 1927 until 1937, where he researched Afro-Brazilian culture in Bahia.
In 1944, the Agenda Geral das Colonias published his book on slavery in the
1922, he was the first author to do research in Minas Gerais and Luanda archives
on the Brazilian rebels deported to Angola in 1789. His works are at times bewil-
dering, but overall inspiring. Conveying his transatlantic parochialism from
Porto to Sapucaf (Minas Gerais) and then to Luanda, Ruela Pombo improved re-
cant documents on Congo and Angola were printed and annotated for the first
time in Diogo Caao, prompting the edition of Luanda’s journal titled Arquiuos de
87
Angola. Well after Ruela Pombo’s death, P. E. H. Hair acknowledged his “pio-
20
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Pombo —inaugurates the “Angolista history,” that is, the history of Angola from
89
the settlers’ perspective.
rica at that time. Notably, Cadornega establishes a literary connection across the
South Atlantic, stating that his Historia Geral emulated Portuguese books on
the Brasilic Wars waged in Pernambuco against the Dutch. To him, the battles
the Angolistas fought in seventeenth century deserved as much merit as the Bra-
silic and Portugal’s Restoration Wars.
By editing the Historia Geral in 1938-1942, amid the celebrations of the 1640
Restoration, Fr. Ruela Pombo and Canon Jose Mathias Delgado, professor at the
Escola Superior Colonial, gave full significance to Cadornega’s work. Echoing
concludes his introduction to the 1940 edition of the Historia Geral by praising
the endeavors of generations of Portuguese who with the “greatest sacrifices
and works bequeathed to us such rich heritage of Angola which constitutes Por-
90
tugal’s future.”
andre Silva Correa in his Historia de Angola (1787-1799). An army officer in Lu-
anda for seven years, Silva Correa, based on documents and oral sources from
Luanda and Rio de Janeiro, envisaged Angola in relationship with Brazil’s his-
tory. As Joseph Miller observed, Silva Correa “betrays his sympathies with his
American countrymen.” 91
Published in 1937 by Manuel Murias, an influential cultural activist of Sala-
zar’s regime, Silva Correa book, like Cadornega’s Histo'ria, was viewed as a fur-
ther testimony “of the Portuguese historic culture” in Africa, outside its South
Atlantic context. Conversely, Brazil’s historiography or Brazilian authors ig-
nored both books. 92 However, Cadornega and Silva Correa’s works constitute
21
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
In his 1841 preface to the first edition of Cronica da Guine (1453-1460), the
Viscount of Santarem —an experienced historian and Portuguese diplomat
praised Zurara’s work as a testimony to the “priority” of Lisbon’s arrival in
93
Africa. Three decades later, the Viscount of Paiva Manso’s Histdria do Congo
(1877), with key historical documents on the Portuguese in Kongo and Angola,
was published. A noted jurist, Paiva Manso had previously edited government’s
documents and charts probing, against British claims, Portugal’s rights at the
tions, including the Portuguese clergy, in Angola. From the nineteenth to the
twentieth centuries, the publication of those books had the same purpose: to
Africa over the competing colonial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Portugal than in any other European colonial power. A fresh colonial power,
African territories. 97
22
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
As Bernard Bailyn has noted, Salazar was one of the authorities quoted by
Ross Hoffman, a leading Catholic historian teaching at Columbia University,
in his 1945 plea for an “Atlantic community” aimed at uniting the “progeny of
Western Christendom.” 98 However, the strategic Portuguese space in the Atlan-
tic, particularly the Azores Allied military base, granted Salazar better assets
than the defense of the Christianity in Africa. Although Catholic Spain was still
Silva Rego was the second. In 1947, with decisive support from Salazar and from
Goa’s Catholic Patriarch in the East Indies, he edited the first of its ten volumes
of documents on the missions in Asia. In his introduction, alluding in a timely
them.” According to him, only Portuguese colonial rule could protect Catholics
100
in India. A graduate in history at the Catholic University of Louvain, where an
Ecole de Sciences Coloniales was founded in 1909 to instruct Belgian mission-
aries and colonial officials, Silva Rego himself became an influential professor
The third component of the global missionary history was launched in 1952,
when Fr. Antonio Brasio published the first volume of his Monumenta Missionaria
Africana (mma ). 102 A Holy Ghost or Spiritan Father, Brasio belonged to the reli-
Herein lies one of the discrepancies concerning the Catholic missions in the
first and second European expansion. Whereas the Jesuits, Capuchins, and Do-
minicans established missions on four continents from the sixteenth century
through the eighteenth, the second European expansion saw the emergence
of congregations centered on specific cultural areas. Like the Spiritans order,
23
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
tinique, and sub-Saharan Africa, the White Fathers was founded in 1868 to act
in Muslim North Africa, and the Society of the Divine World missionaries (1875)
was effective in China. More specialized culturally and regionally, those mis-
sionaries and their scholarship and documentary records lack the global and
multicultural approach to evangelization embodying the congregations cou-
pled to the first European expansion.
In 1865 the Spiritan congregation obtained the administration of abandoned
Capuchins missions in Congo and Angola. 103 Fr. Jose Maria Antunes, the first
Portuguese past in Angola, Fr. Antunes copied the complete Paris manuscript of
Cadornega’s Historici and partially published it, for the first time, in a 1902 issue
105
of Portugal em Africa ,
the Spiritan missionary journal he edited.
In 1943 Fr. Brasio began editing Portugal em Africa where he collaborated with
,
ideologues and self-taught historians like Manuel Murias and other personal-
ities of the Salazar regime. Consequently, the mma series had matured for a de-
cade before the publication of its first volume. 106
Brasio’s works, along with those of many of his country’s Africanists, must
also be set within the rivalry between the Portuguese and Belgian Catholics, on
one side, and the Belgian, English, and American Protestant missionaries and
107
colonial officials in Central and Austral Africa, on the other. Like many Por-
tuguese and Catholic Belgians, Brazil’s consul in Luanda believed that Protes-
tant missionaries and American evangelical leaders encouraged ethnic tensions
108
and revolt among Angolans in 1961.
mma series, with twenty-three volumes edited and published during his lifetime,
as a unique repertory. This documentary collection has contributed decisively to
most of the research on early West and West Central Africa, making Brasio’s
intellectual influence more enduring than those of Serafim Leite and Silva Rego.
His prefaces to the mma volumes foreshadow the dramas that preceded and fol-
lowed the decolonization, namely in Angola, the main country reported in the
annotated, and edited important manuscript data from Congo and Angola, the
only European enclave in Africa where consistent colonial sources existed from
110
the sixteenth century on.
uments they researched —between Brazil and Angola’s Jesuits. This issue may
also be raised regarding Dauril Alden’s book on the Society of Jesus, which,
despite its global scope, suffers from the same territorial bias toward the Jesuits’
111
undertakings in the South Atlantic.
The twentieth century’s missionary regional focus, territorial history, and
academic divisions severed the global interpretations of the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Jesuit chroniclers. Indeed, the separate and sometimes con-
flicting studies of the missions in Brazil, on one side, and of Angola and Congo,
on the other, are a blatant example of the misperceptions engendered by the
territorial and national historical frameworks.
the father of Brazil’s independency and the Braganza dynasty as its guarantor,
emphasized the Inconfidencia Mineira, the 1789 rebellion in Minas Gerais, and
112
praised Tirandentes, the rebels’ leader, executed by the Crown.
Renewing political ties with the Americas’ nations, thenceforth fully ruled
narratives as the dominant model of national history. The fact that Portuguese
America’s vice-kingdom was the only American colonial aggregate to still stand
in its entirety after the national independences improved this territorial histo-
riographical trend.
established the key role of the gold cycle and Minas Gerais in the building of the
Similarly, dissensions between the states and Rio de Janeiro’s central govern-
ment revived local narratives in Brazil, strengthening the territorial bias. In-
spired by Sao Paulo’s and Pernambuco’s chronicles written since the 1600s,
a commander in the Brasilic war against the Dutch who was rewarded by Lisbon
with governorships in Brazil and Angola, merely dedicates a few pages to his
government in Luanda. 114 This is striking, considering the decades-long en-
From this point, seminal books on Brazil’s history eclipsed the South Atlan-
tic approach. References to the Brazil’s exchanges with Africa and to the inter-
ventions of its settlers in Angola were included in Varnhagen’s first edition of
Historic! Geral do Brasil (1857), but they were suppressed by the editors from the
widely publicized and still quoted twentieth-century edition of his book. 115
Capistrano de Abreu’s Capitulos de Historia Colonial (1907), a programmatic
work on colonial history praised by generations of historians of Brazil, focuses
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
on inland sertoes expansion and does not make a single reference to Angola. 116
To Capistrano de Abreu and his disciples, the African segment of the Brazilian
slave system did not fit into the country’s colonial history.
At the First Congress of History of Brazil, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1914, a noted
jurist and future general attorney, Joao Luiz Alves, wrote a dense essay on the
international treaties and national laws regarding the suppression of the slave
trade in the South Atlantic. By that time, when little or none research was being
117
done in the few existing Brazilian faculties, Alves’s essay became a reference.
Incidentally, the legal aspects of the slave trade were also central in the book of
the French jurist Georges Scelle —one of the founders of contemporary interna-
tional law —on the Asiento de Negros. Published in 1906, this still authoritative
118
work was known by Brazilian specialists. However, such approaches left little
minating in the work of Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala (1933), Africa’s
the National Statistics Agency (ibge) enhanced the study of the Brazilian pop-
ulations. Reliable and comprehensive data on the populations’ strata were ana-
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
of the color and racial statistics from 1872, 1900, 1920, and 1940 were put into
122
perspective for the first time.
confirmed by Philip Curtin in his pathbreaking census on the slave trade. Still,
as David Eltis has shown, Curtin and Goulart underestimate illegal disembark-
ments Brazil during the nineteenth century. In spite of Goulart’s comprehensive
assessments, most of the subsequent Brazilian studies on slavery did not scruti-
125
nize the African regions or the influx of deportees to the Brazilian ports.
Although Gilberto Freyre had already published 0 mundo que 0 portugues criou
traders in the past, Pinto de Andrade was well aware of the differences between
Brazil and Angola. Namely, he underlines a key point of the disparity between
the two sides of the Portuguese South Atlantic: the growth of the mulatto popu-
White neither entirely Blacks . . . but Mulattos and Caboclos (Indian Mestizos)”
to strengthen Portuguese garrisons in Goa, Timor, and Macau, the most vul-
129
nerable Portuguese overseas territories in those days.
As is well known, Brazilian governments, and particularly the Kubistchek
reviewed by David Birmingham and Boxer, the book has not received due at-
tention from today’s researchers. In fact, some of the analysis and historical
tions with Africa, mainly with Angola, encompassing colonial and national
periods, as well as the un debates on Africa’s decolonization.
It is noteworthy that the book was promoted by the Brazil’s Ministry of For-
eign Relations. Breaking decades of unconditional alliance with Portuguese co-
lonialism, under the Quadros and Goulart administrations (1960-1964) Brazil
Even before the 1964 dictatorship, the African-Brazilian writer and diplo-
mat Raymundo Souza Dantas subtly portrayed the failed expectations of Brazil’s
“independent foreign policy.” 131 His book records his frustrating mission as
132
Brazil’s ambassador (1961-1963) in Ghana and special envoy in Togo.
In any event, the coup d’etat instating the dictatorial and pro-Salazar regime
in Brazil stifled the debate on Lusophone Africa’s independence. Active in the
undertakings favoring Luso-African movements at the un from i960 through
1964, the diplomat Antonio Houaiss, later a celebrated lexicographer, was pun-
ished by the dictatorship in the aftermath of the coup d’etat. Accused of being
“an enemy of Portugal,” Houaiss had his political rights revoked for ten years
133
and was expelled from the Brazilian diplomatic career in 1964. Nonetheless,
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
after a close association with Salazarist politics in Africa, the Brazilian dictator-
ship, under the Geisel presidency (1970-1974) recognized the Lusophone Afri-
134
can countries’ independences. Again, Brazil’s interest turned to Africa.
de la Plata history, due, of course, to the Potosf silver trade through Salta, Tucu-
man, and Cordoba to Buenos Aires. From Valparaiso and the Pacific a second
135
path across Santiago and Mendoza reached Cordoba and Buenos Aires.
Aside the Panama isthmus a second overland path linked the Atlantic and the
Pacific. Apart from illegal exchanges with African ports, smuggling took also
place via Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. When returning from the Rio de la Plata, the
ships brought in, to Rio de Janeiro but also to Bahia and Recife, coined and un-
coined silver, as well as gold, which then traveled to Luanda and Lisbon. A cen-
tury before the eighteenth century’s gold mining in Minas Gerais, Upper Peru’s
silver was already boosting South Atlantic maritime exchanges. Thus in the
ish silver reals of eight (el real de a ocho) emerged as the most lucrative Portuguese
137
export product in Asian markets. Clearly, South Atlantic slave trade was a crit-
seize Buenos Aires. Well informed about geopolitical stakes in the overseas, the
Dutch and Portuguese governors assumed that the dominance of the Ethiopic
Ocean required the possession of Brazil’s plantations, Angola’s slaves, and the
silver trade in Rio de la Plata. This common strategy challenges today’s schol-
arly works based on the partition of the South Atlantic in the “Dutch,” “Span-
ish,” or “Portuguese Atlantic.”
Because of the elusiveness of such exchanges, the data on silver and slaves
traded in Rio de la Plata is one of the main unknown records of South America
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
economic history. The Potosi silver exported from Buenos Aires to Brazil was
138
then sent to Goa to settle the Portuguese trade in Asia. Such transactions drove
the foundation of Colonia do Sacramento (1680-1750), a key Lisbon smuggling
enclave fronting Buenos Aires.
Ocean through the eighteenth century. In 1763, Lisbon transferred the Portu-
guese America capital from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. Closer to the gold mine area,
the new vice-regal capital could also secure Portuguese enclaves in the South
from Spanish attacks. Spain vainly attempted to breach the Luso-Brazilian
domination in the southern Atlantic —based on the slave trade —creating the
vice-kingdom of La Plata (1776). Together with Potosi and the River Plate hin-
terlands, the new vice-kingdom, sieged in Buenos Aires, comprehend also the
African islands of Fernando Po and Annobon, as well as the slave trade of Cam-
South Atlantic network was unsuccessful. 140 Only after 1788, when all nations
were able to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, were Africans intro-
duced in great numbers in the Spanish Caribbean, mainly in Cuba. 141
Recalling the conflicts with the Portuguese, the Brazilians, and the British,
otal in shaping the vice-kingdom of La Plata, and the short-lived Provincias Uni-
das del Rio de la Plata (1811-1826) aimed to shelter former vice-regal territories
such as Ricardo Lavene, Diego Luis Molinari, and Ricardo de Lafuente Machain,
issued documents and essays on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century net-
143
works of the Rio de la Plata.
the Rio de la Plata slave trade in 1916. Though Molinari’s work had an enlarged
second edition in 1944, Elena Studer more significantly researched the subject
some years later. Her book was praised by Frank Tannenbaum as “a milestone
on the road toward a history of the Negro in South America.” 144 Later, Carlos
Angola, Tucuman, Cordoba, and Buenos Aires to Brazilian and Luanda ports in
145
his 1966.
In addition, yellow fever epidemics took their toll on the poor white and black
148
neighborhoods of Buenos Aires in 1871. By the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the census data show a sharp decline in the Afro-Argentinian population.
Since then, the “disappearance” of Buenos Aires’s blacks has been discussed in
Argentina and in United States. “There is probably no other instance in the his-
tory of colonization where such a large imported colored population has disap-
peared in such a comparatively short space of time,” wrote Charles L. Chandler,
the well-informed commentator on Molinari’s pioneering essay on the slave
149
trade, in 1917.
32
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
accounts and catechisms aimed at the Kongo kingdom and Angola communi-
151
ties. As much as in Portugal, missionary research and writings are an essen-
tial component of the Belgian historiography on West and Central Africa.
Still, Portugal was one of oldest territorial, religious, culturally, and linguis-
tic unified nation-states, where a prior overseas expansion enabled the alliance
with England in order to protect the country’s frontiers from Spain. By contrast,
Belgium was a relatively new state practicing a late colonialism.
ened the Flemish and Walloon citizens’ support for the state-nation. Thus Joseph
Conrad’s novel An Outpost of Progress (1897) caricaturized Walloon and Flemish
Belgian colonialism through two characters, the idiots Carlier (Walloon) and
Kayerts (Flemish), who pretend to civilize the Congo. 152
While Portugal’s colonialism strengthened her external, European frontiers,
the Belgians’ colonialism served to break her internal, domestic frontiers. Con-
versely, the decolonization led Belgium to a crisis that transformed the country
unitary government into a federal state in which Flemish and Walloons ceased
to imagine themselves as members of a unique nation.
To Canon Louis Jadin, Willy Bal, and other Belgian Africanists who gradu-
ated from the Universite Catholique de Louvain, the distressing partition of
their alma mater and Catholic academic stronghold in 1968, amid the divisive
Walloon and Flemish conflict, could recall, mutatis mutandis, the tragic vanish-
ing of the Catholic Belgian Congo. 153
Thus some native languages, such as Lingala, Cibula, Kiswahili, and Kicongo,
were generally used in the missions and the Belgian colonial administration,
154
favoring linguistics and ethnological studies.
Bishop ofMatadi from 1930 until 1962 and missionary in Congo for decades,
Jean Cuvelier extensively combined oral sources and manuscripts from Euro-
pean archives to write his essays and to publish important documents on Con-
golese history. A member of the Redemptorist congregation —the main Belgian
missionaries in West Central Africa — his works and the documents he analyzed
and edited with Fr. Louis Jadin influenced two generations of Congo’s histori-
155
ans, including, as will see below, Jan Vansina, who studied at the Universite
156
Catholique de Louvain, as well as Georges Balandier and W. G. L. Randles.
Accordingly, John Thornton considers Cuvelier “the most influential historian to
157
write of Kongo origins.” Substantially based on Portuguese sources and histo-
rians (Paiva Manso and Ruela Pombo, Arquiuos de Angola) his bio-bibliographical
“Congo ex-Belgian,” Robert Cornevin expressed his admiration for the “dyna-
verberated in several ways in Angola. At first, reshaping her colonial policy and
34
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
distancing itself from failed Belgian, French, and British colonial policies in Af-
rica, in the early 1960s Lisbon adopted Freyre’s ideas on Brazil’s colonization
(mainly in Angola), was a policy that brought back the South Atlantic into co-
162
lonial and historical debates. Later, as the Angolan independence was pro-
claimed in Luanda amid a civil war, the Belgian Congo turned into a more dra-
matic example. Intentionally or not, the recall of the troubles and massacres of
the first Congo crises (1960-1965) frightened most of the colonists, provoking
Salvador de S a and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1686 (1952) and Frederic
163
Mauro’s Le Portugal I’Atlantique au XVIIe siecle (i960). Aside from nationalistic
books, both authors moved beyond the limitations of territorial-based models
of historical writing to cover the two margins of the South Atlantic.
Charles Boxer researched and wrote on area studies before World War II. Far
from Eurocentrism, several of his essays on Portuguese, English, and Dutch
presence in East Asia, India, and Middle East, remain authoritative to scholarly
work. 164 His book on Salvador de Sa outlines the first global view of the 1600s
southern Atlantic Ocean and its European, West Central African, and South
American extensions, including the Rio de la Plata and Potosi. Unlike Portu-
guese and Brazilian nationalist historians’ writings on Salvador de Sa’s feats,
analysis on Angola and Congo complete his approaches on South America and
165
European history. On the Brazilian side, Boxer connected, albeit with some
generalizations, the bandeirantes slave-hunting raids in Paraguay with the mari-
concern on the cultures of Congo and Angola —a region he did not visit until
1961 — could arguably have been inspired by recollections of his wife, Emily Hahn,
the well-known American writer and journalist who lived in Belgian Congo
166
during 1931-1932.
While Charles Boxer appeared as a cosmopolitan and eclectic historian,
Frederic Mauro was a creature of the French academic system. Fernand Braudel
advised his doctoral thesis, however, and that changed everything. Moreover,
Mauro’s research relates to that of two other Braudel disciples, Pierre Chaunu
and Vitorino de Magalhaes Godinho.
Though his main work is centered on the Estado da India, Magalhaes Go-
dinho edited crucial documents on the Portuguese Atlantic and wrote an inno-
vative essay on the South Atlantic exchanges on enslaved Africans and silver
from Potosi, as well as on sugar and gold from Brazil. His studies on northern
and western Africa renewed the research on the gold circuit from Gold Coast
to the Mediterranean. Connections linking the first Angolan governors with the
Portuguese asentistas, a crucial step for Lisbon’s supremacy in the South Atlan-
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Arabian Sea the world system analysis that
South Atlantic exchanges. Focusing on the Brazilian sugar industry, wheat and
wine exports from the Azores and Madeira Islands (named the “East Atlantic”),
the maritime transport, price fluctuations, and the exchanges with Europe, Le
36
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Portugal et I’Atlantique set aside the African history. Mauro compresses into a
contracts, and the African slave trade. Therein, the political and cultural com-
plexities of these issues are altogether scrutinized under a short section devoted
169
to colonial manpower .
Still, the book’s greatest contribution remains the evidence gathering and
analysis of the main productions and commodities of the Portuguese Atlantic
in the seventeenth century. Careful assessment of short cycles and long trends
on production, seafaring, royal taxes, prices, exchange, and monetary practices
gives all its significance to Le Portugal et I’Atlantique, which, to many historians,
170
served as a complement to Boxer’s Salvador de S .
tory. Indeed, to Braudel, the Mediterranean, the oldest maritime space ever en-
compassed by men, studied by him in the course of the sixteenth century, “at
the end of its grandeur,” was quite diverse from the Atlantic, “a space which
borrowed its past and was hastily constructed.” Accordingly, the “global his-
I’Atlantique, which outlined an “arbitrary space of the ocean and not the whole
171
Atlantic .” Braudel’s remarks, many of which disavow comparisons between
Mediterranean and Atlantic history, could likewise apply to other works, partic-
ularly to Mauro’s book. In addition, there are differences between Chaunu,
Mauro, and Boxer’s own methods.
Commenting on Salvador de Sri, Chaunu states that the book belonged to the
“very great history.” However, involved in his vast statistical research on the
Spanish empire, Chaunu regrets the lack of quantitative data on price series and
shipping movements in Boxer’s work.
The intense research and appraisal of quantitative data undertaken by Chaunu,
Mauro, Magalhaes Godinho, and many Annales specialists on the Atlantic and
on the Asian Iberian expansions deserve consideration.
As a matter of fact, Braudel’s first disciples nurtured a twofold intellectual
37
PORTUGUESE LSTERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
contrasts and exchanges of the overseas, an always-current theme. Thus the sig-
length.
Yet Chaunu only briefly mentions “the Angolan paradoxical exception” —the
South Atlantic Gyre, which shortens maritime routes and brings Luanda closer
to Brazil —and “the clear evidences of Brazilian [sic] activities on the African
coast.” His two remarkable maps on the nautical distances, improving Mauro’s
maps, do not contain any African port or latitudinal sea route under the equator.
In his scheme, Lisbon, Cadiz, and their extensions toward the Caribbean and
South America portray the entire Iberian Atlantic. At that time Chaunu was closely
surveying the Spanish asientos and the Portuguese role in the African trade. 178
But he does not raise such issues in his comments, nor does he notice the per-
spectives previously opened on Congo and Angola history by Salvador de Sa.
Some factors could explain Braudel’s disciples’ disregard for the South At-
lantic World. Surveys on the bilateral trade were scarce and unquantified at that
time. Hitherto the figures and wide-ranging descriptions, in Verger’s 1968 book,
of the exchanges carried on tobacco and slaves between Bahia and the Bight of
Benin were not available. 179
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
To be sure, the exports of Brazilian sugarcane rum to Africa and the flux of
trades from Rio de Janeiro to Angola, especially regarding Benguela, were better
captured and analyzed by later historians. Above all, Mauro and Chaunu sche-
Iberian or Dutch South Atlantic. Chaunu’s essay quoted above is entitled “Bresil
et Atlantique au XVIIe siecle.” In the same vein, in The Dutch in Brazil (1957),
Boxer segregated the wic occupation in Portuguese America from the one that
occurred in Angola, scattering the single military front and historical space he
181
skillfully described five years before.
in the Portuguese empire and his comparative approach to four municipal coun-
cils throughout the Portuguese empire. In this later book, Boxer highlighted the
imports of Brazilian sugarcane rum (jeribita) in Luanda around 1699, stressing
183
the bilateral trade in the South Atlantic network. With the notable exception
of Pierre Verger’s book (mentioned below), a territorial focus predominates
among national and foreign authors of Brazil’s history after Salvador de Sa' and
Le Portugal et I’Atlantique.
In the United States, following Philip Curtin’s account, the interest on Africa
passed from “the Small Awakening of the 1950s” to “the Great Awakening of
186
the 1960s.” By that time, under Curtin and Jan Vansina’s direction, the Uni-
In 1966 Jan Vansina published The Kingdoms of the Savannah, defined by Henri
Brunschwig as the work of the “master of the historical studies essentially based
187
on oral sources,” a method then unfamiliar to many French historians. First
pers diffused the tragedies of the Congo Kinshasa First Republic (1960-1965)
the book has as a background the dramatic failure of Belgian colonization and
the resilience of traditional structures within the new African countries. Still,
Vansina explains that Angola, albeit a colony, is studied beside the major Afri-
can states of the region: Kongo, Luba, Lunda, Kazembe, and Lozi. To him, at the
end of the seventeenth century Angola turned out to be “the first substantial”
188
colony in Africa. As we will see below, the book was influential in the shaping
of West Central African nation-state identities in the wake of the independences
of the region’s countries.
Georges Balandier, a disciple of Georges Gurvitch and Michel Leiris and a
leading Africanist in France, in 1965 issued his La vie quotidienne au royaume de
189
Kongo du XVIe au XVI He siecle. Although reviewers criticized the book for the
incomplete and deficient use of written sources, it relies a great deal on the au-
thor’s previous scholarship and extensive knowledge on contemporary Gabon
and Congo-Brazzaville. Noteworthy also is his activities in postwar French edi-
torial, intellectual, and anticolonialist circles, therein making his works essen-
190
tial references in African studies.
40
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
on the wic invasion in Brazil and Angola, Randles mentions the Soyo embassy
“African history deals with African cultures, and there is no escape from an-
thropology” 194
— even, one could have added, in areas where the written sources
are richer in sub-Saharan Africa. Conversely, Vansina’s more sharp comments
on Balandier’s book claim the key role of the historical analysis, blaming the
195
author’s uncritical and limited references to the written sources.
Such books point out connections on Angola and Brazil. Following Boxer’s
and the Angolista authors, Birmingham indicates the impact that governors sent
from Brazil had in Angola. 196 On his side, Vansina underlines the exports of food
and the transfer of plants or soldiers from Portuguese America to Angola. Taking
an expression from Ralph Delgado and Oliveira Martins, he states that Angola
became “practically a colony of Brazil” after the seventeenth-century Portugal’s
and Brazil’s expeditions that overcame the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms. This
type of historical oddity featured across the South Atlantic has not attracted much
197
attention from the numerous scholarly readers of Kingdoms of the Sauannah.
In fact, the above-mentioned works aimed to foster Africanist research and
do not envision the South Atlantic perspective. Moreover, in Trade and Empire in
the Atlantic, 1400-1600, a later book that studies the subject more broadly, David
Birmingham only slightly addresses the South Atlantic historical context. 198
Written by academics for academics, such books were appropriated by Afri-
can activists and national elites. Vansina recalled in a interview the unattended
reception of Kingdoms of the Savanna among Angolan nationalists: “Almost im-
mediately, a sort of illicit traffic developed, above all in the direction of Angola
41
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
where you were looked upon as a freedom fighter when you were in possession
of that book!” 199
That aside, Jean-Luc Vellut, another important representative of the Belgian
Africanist tradition, criticized the “resistencialism” of late 1960s and 1970s re-
One might add that there is also an European Africanism from outside and an-
other from inside the former colonial metropolises. So, writing from Belgium
about the polemics on Adam Hochschild’s book on King Leopold II’s crimes in
Congo, Vellut stated that some critics were unfair, adding: “Vansina is too sub-
tle a scholar to join this chorus, but he clearly wants to collect some benefits
202
from a position of fellow traveller in exile.”
In any case, such scholarly trends led to Africa-centered research and analy-
sis. As long as Africanists studies understate the Atlantic connections, academic
specialization hampered surveys on the South Atlantic.
cas and in Europe. This partition rested on the assumption that slavery and re-
gional slave trade in South America and Caribbean pertain to the Americanist
son Games criticizes the “disjunctions that characterized the Atlantic’s histor-
42
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
An African-Brazilianist Field
Apart from such territorial-based research, Pierre Verger —more ofan academic
outsider than Charles Boxer —published his book Flux et rejlux de la traite des negres
205
(1968). A French-Brazilian fluent in Yoruba who lived in Bahia, Senegal, Ni-
geria, and Dahomey (renamed Benin in 1975), and a sacred Babalawo (priest of
Ifa) in Ketu in 1952, Verger relied on Bahia, Lisbon, London, The Hague, Ibadan,
and Porto Novo archives as well as photos and oral sources. Originally a photog-
rapher, Verger turned academic researcher under Theodore Monod, Roger Bas-
206
tide, and Braudel’s supervision.
Even though the book does not take a perspective on Angola and the global
South Atlantic history, the unifying survey on the bilateral exchanges between
Bahia and the Bight of Benin confirm Flux et rejlux as a founding study in the
Africanist-Brazilianist field.
Reviewing the book, Curtin wrote, “The slave trade was an Atlantic com-
merce with profound influence on the history of Europe, Africa, and the two
Americas. Yet historians have seldom treated it in Atlantic perspective. Pierre
Verger has done just that. . . . His most significant contribution, indeed, is the
equal weight he gives to events on either side of the ocean.” On his side, Boxer
207
describes the book as “the definitive work on the subject of which it treats.”
such as works by Stuart Schwartz and Katia Mattoso, which relied mainly on the
208
tradition of the Brazilian territorial history.
In the same way, the transatlantic approach of Flux ct reflux was not incorpo-
rated by some important French authors of works in either African or Atlantic
history. Thus the magnitude of bilateral relations between African and South
American ports is absent in the Histoire generate de I’Afrique Noire (1970), edited by
Hubert Deschamps. Composed by prestigious Africanists and widely publicized
in Francophone universities, this collective work presents maps on the Atlantic
routes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that do not reflect the direct
exchanges between the Brazilian ports and the Bight of Benin or Angola and
Mozambique. 209
Paul Butel’s Histoire de I’Atlantique: De l’antiquite a nos jours refers to “a global
history of the ocean.” Although he analyzes the Dutch invasion of Brazil and
Angola in the seventeenth century and the Chesapeake tobacco trade in the
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
XVIe-XVIIIe siecles (1979). From his teachings and his discussions with colleagues
at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, as well as from his knowledge of the field’s
historiography, Braudel was well aware of the exchanges between South Amer-
ica and sub-Saharan Africa and of the La Plata and Potosf extensions of the
South Atlantic network. In fact, reviewing two influential books by the Brazilian
historian Caio Prado Junior in 1948, Braudel criticized his territorial bias and
his neglect of the south-south exchanges: “Why did Caio Prado not pay more
211
attention to the South Atlantic history?”
Therefore, considering all he wrote, taught, and discussed with his students,
Braudel’s analysis of the slave trade and Africa is rather unexpected. In Ciuili-
sation matenelle he allots just a few pages to western and sub-Saharan Africa.
Broadly, he commends Curtin’s “prodigious innovative” book on inland and
maritime slave trade in Senegambia and endorses traditional surveys on the “tri-
angular trade” between Liverpool or Nantes, West Africa, and the Caribbean.
Concluding, he assesses without any restriction the triangular trade and adds:
212
“This scheme is the same mutatis mutandis for all the Slave ships.”
Braudel does not take in account the figures or the geographical distribution
quite accurately indicated in Curtin’s Census (1968) —of Atlantic slave trade. Sur-
prising, he neither comments on nor quotes from the work of Pierre Verger,
whose thesis he directed and whose book he promoted and published in France.
Had he done so, he would have brought into consideration the core of the South
Atlantic slave network, that is, the bilateral trade between Brazil and Africa.
in the first half of the nineteenth century. This issue has also been raised regarding
the discussion on the Williams-Drescher debate. 213 As later research has shown,
one-fourth of the transatlantic slave trade occurred after the 1807 British and
United States Abolition Acts. Most of these nineteenth-century deportees, around
214
70 percent of them, crossed the South Atlantic and disembarked in Brazil.
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Another important factor behind the neglect of South Atlantic studies con-
cerns the uneasiness of some historians from European maritime powers, and
from Brazil for that matter, to discuss their countries’ participation in the slave
trade —not to mention authors who overlook or even deny such issues.
comparable, reliable, and largely accepted data on the traffic promoted by the
European nations in the various regions of Africa. Even though these data (and
the subsequent Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, completed and organized
by D. Eltis, D. Richardson, and others) had not granted an “admirable impar-
issue, thus instilling in most of them a “neutral nationality” that made them
more apt to study the Atlantic slave trade.
Ultimately, the defining features of the South Atlantic network are the bilat-
eral exchanges with Africa and the coupling of the Brazilian slavery and slave
trade with the industrial production and free trade movement in England. As
in many key issues in history, the main distinction between North and South
Atlantic history lies in the periodization. As we saw in the first paragraphs of
this article, the end of the Brazilian slave trade and the close of the Sailing Age
decreased the geopolitical significance of the South Atlantic Gyre and of the
Ethiopic Ocean denotation, opening another era in Atlantic history.
to its northern area. Instead, longitudinal navigation connecting Europe and the
United States to the South American and African ports displayed the new inter-
national division of labor and the North’s dominance over the South. Until the
1980s the airline connections matched this framework. By that time, to travel
from Buenos Aires, Bahia, or Rio de Janeiro to Lagos or Luanda, one had to go
through Lisbon or London. Flying from Rio de Janeiro to Mozambique, the trav-
eler went first to London, then to Johannesburg, and then to Louren^o Marques-
Maputo.
Reviewing Rodrigues’s Africa e Brasil in 1962, D. Birmingham wrote: “The em-
phasis on the importance of South America in the history of Africa is especially
45
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
valuable. The two continents have so little contact today that we need to be
216
reminded of their interdependence in the past .” Postcolonial geopolitics in
the South Atlantic changed those issues some, but not much. As Canizares-
Esguerra and Breen recently observed, “Northwestern Europeanization” still
217
stands as a normative model in Atlantic World narratives .
Stressing their own culture since their nations’ independence, South Ameri-
cans have asseverated to North Americans and to Europeans that they are also
themselves Americans. Thanks to the new nations of Africa, the main constitu-
ent of Caribbean and eastern South America, we shall not have to wait two more
centuries to establish that South Atlantic history is also Atlantic history.
NOTES
1. Lois and Garcia, “Do Oceano dos classicos aos Mares dos imperios”; Peterson,
Stramma, and Kortum, “Early Concepts and Charts of Ocean Circulation.” Aside from
an English translation ofZurara’s Cronica, this long essay bluntly ignores the abundant
Portuguese charts, sources, and literature on the topic. See, for instance, Cortesao and
Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica.
2. Monet, Abrege du parallele des langues Jrarifoise et latine repporte au plus pres de leurs pro-
prietez, 27. Hence, sub-Saharans peoples living in West Africa were named “Western Ethi-
opians,” while those living in East Africa were called “Eastern Ethiopians.” Du Jarric,
Histoire des choses plus memorables aduenues tant ez Indes Orientates, 25. Likewise, Bluteau, a
learned Jesuit lexicographer, located the Mar Ethiopico on the southeastern coast of Af-
rica and named the southern Atlantic Mar da Ethiopia or Mar do Brasil. Bluteau, Vocabu-
3. Blaeu, Noua Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica Ac Hydrographica Tabula. See also Duval,
Le planisphere autrement la carte du monde terrestre ou sont exactement descrites toutes les terres decou-
4. Philander, “Atlantic Ocean Equatorial Currents.” See also South Atlantic Ocean: West-
ern Portion [1871], drawn by E. J. Powell (London: Admiralty Charts, 1891), http://nla.gov
.au/nla.map-rm2223-ai (accessed September 2013).
5. The Cyclopaedia states: “The Atlantic is divided into three principal basins: the
Southern or Ethiopic, from the Antarctic Ocean to the narrows between Cape San Roque
and Senegambia; the Middle or Atlantic proper from the same narrows to the range of
islands formed by the British and Faroe islands and Iceland; and the Northern or Artie.”
Ripley and Dana, The American Cyclopaedia, 2:69.
6. Illustrating the Ethiopic Ocean’s asymmetry, the northern boundary of the map is
46
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
shows the equator as its southern limit. According to the John Carter Brown Library’s
cartobibliographic note, the map was engraved by John Senex in 1763 and issued later by
William Herbert as A New Map, or Chart in Mercator’s Projection of the Ethiopic Ocean with Part
of Africa and South America; Herbert, A New Map, or Chart in Mercators Projection, of the Western
or Atlantic Ocean with Part of Europe, Africa and South America, http://jcb.lunaimaging.com/
September 2013).
Other maps locate the northern boundary at 3 degrees N; see J. F. Dessiou, A Chart of
the Ethiopic or Southern Ocean and part of the Pacific Ocean . . . (London: W. Faden, 1808),
http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm3026 (accessed September 2013).
7. Robertson, The Elements o/Navigation, 1:173, 1:179; Findlay, A Sailing Directory for the
Ethiopic or South Atlantic Ocean, 1-2; Ripley and Dana, The American Cyclopaedia, 2:69.
10. During the illegal African trade to Brazil (1831-1850) and Cuba (1820-1867),
slave trade ships disguised themselves as whaling ships to avoid Royal Navy surveillance.
Warrin, So ends this day —The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927, 152-157.
11. Aside from the chief catch areas within the North Atlantic, important sperm and
humpback whale catches also occurred around the Tropic of Capricorn, close to the Bra-
zilian and Angolan coasts. Smith et al., “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American
Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail.”
12. Moment, “The Business of Whaling in America in the 1850s.”
13. Rennell’s daughter, Jane Rodd, published his work posthumously. Rennel, An
Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic Ocean . .
. ,
166, 174, 225.
14. The presence of free or enslaved black seamen stands as a characteristic feature
of the Luso-Brazilian slave trade. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 85-86; De Moraes, “La
champagne negriere du Sam Antonio e as Almas (1670)”; Pinho Candido, “Different Slave
Journeys.”
15 . Medeiro dos Santos, A Produfdo das Minas do Alto Peru e a Evasao de Prata para 0 Brasil;
16. Total voyages to Brazil, including those that left Portugal’s ports, amount to
18,850 resulting in the embarkment of 5.8 million deportees and the disembarkment
of 4,864,374 African deportees. They came from two main areas: the Bight of Benin
(904,000 enslaved); and West Central Africa, mainly Angola (3,656,000 individuals); cal-
culated from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter TSTD), http://www. slave
47
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
19. Even so, there is the known case of Mar^al Luiz, a skilled but illiterate master
who commanded vessels of the Carreira da India for more than twenty-eight years at
the turn of the seventeenth century; see do Amaral Frazao de Vasconcellos, Pilotos das
navegafies portuguesas dos seculos XVI e XVII; Contente Domingues, “Horizontes mentais dos
homens do mar no seculo XVI”; Polonia, “Arte, tecnica e ciencia nautica no Portugal
Moderno.”
20. Caldas, Noticia Geral de Toda Esta Capitania da Bahia.
21. Joze Fernandes Portugal, Carta Reduzida da parte Meridional do Oceano Atlantico ou
22. As shown in his 1799 map of the currents in the Atlantic, and by his descriptions,
Rennell labels the coastal maritime zones from Liberia to the Congo the “Ethiopic Sea”
and uses the name “South Atlantic” for most of the subequatorial ocean. Still, he de-
scribes and draws the northeastern limits of the South Atlantic currents at 10 degrees N;
Rennel, An Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic Ocean . . . , 25, 99. See also the West
Atlantic map, http://www.knmi.nl/apx. schrier/Krt_A.pdf and the East Atlantic http://
26. Leite, Historia da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, 8:398. Like many authors, I use
“Congo” for the river’s basin or today’s two countries in the area, and “Kongo” for the
historical African kingdom whose capital was Mbanza Kongo or Sao Salvador do Congo.
27. Curto, Enslauing Spirits, table 9.
28. Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite de necjres entre legolfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos os Santos,
and its English translation, Trade Relations betiueen the Bicjht of Benin and Bahia; Nardi, 0 junto
brasileiro no periodo colonial.
48
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
and Teixeira Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica, 1:113-114, 5:22-24, and maps
538,539,568.
34. Halperin Donghi, Histoire contemporaine de iAmerique latine, 83, 95; Bushnell, “In-
dependence Compared.”
35. Curtin believes that there was a general “counterrevolution in Spanish America,”
including Brazil, in the aftermath of the nineteenth-century independences. Curtin, The
36. Purdy, Memoir, Descriptive and Explanatory, to Accompany the New Chart 0/ the Ethiopic
or Southern Atlantic Ocean, and The New Sailing Directory for the Ethiopic or Southern Atlantic
Ocean. In 1874, Findlay updated the guide and excluded Purdy’s name from the cover.
37. Bridging the Atlantic, 25. The IPEA is a federal public foundation affiliated to the
fined as a “number of nodal points standing in a few relations, social, religious and eco-
nomic, to other nodal points.” Barendse, “Trade and State in the Arabian Seas.”
39. Referring to the networks connecting Potosi, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia,
Luanda, Lisbon, and Cadiz around American, African, and European trade, Jeremy Adel-
man underscored the significance of a “South Atlantic system.” Sovereign and Revolution
in the Iberian Atlantic, 73-100 . mentioned a “slavery South Atlantic system” in 0 Trato dos
Viventes, 242. Elsewhere I used the term “Capricorn Archipelago” to designate the social
and economic space formed by the formed by the Rio de la Plata and the Portuguese en-
claves on the two shores of the South Atlantic.
41. This section’s subhead refers to a weak spot in the Earth’s magnetic field whose
center is off the coast of Brazil; magnetosphere specialists call it the “South Atlantic
Anomaly.” “‘Dip’ on Earth Is Big Trouble in Space,” New York Times, June 5, 1990.
42. West and Martin, “A Future with a Past”; Lowe, “Resurrection How? A Response
to Michael O. West and William G. Martin’s Article”; West and Martin, “Return to Sender.”
43. Marx’s quote follows: “These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the
colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and orga-
nized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the
feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.” Marx,
Capital, book 1, chap. 31, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” online edition, ed.
Frederick Engels and Ernest Untermann, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chi-
49
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
44. On his chapter on colonial policies, Max Weber writes: “Two main types of ex-
ploitation are met with: the feudal type in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the
capitalistic in the Dutch and English.” Weber, General Economic History, 298. On the oppo-
sition between the “decadent” Iberian Atlantic and the “modernity” of the British and
Dutch Atlantic, see Canizares-Esguerra and Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics.”
45. Sundiata, “Capitalism and Slavery”; Walvin, “Why Did the British Abolish the
Slave Trade?”
46. The US Census Bureau includes Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia in the
“South Atlantic” Division. The Library of Congress site of Map Collections utilizes “South
Atlantic” relating only to the US southern states.
49. “The South Atlantic System had its center in Brazil and the West Indies; sugar
was its main product.” Henretta and Brody, America: A Concise History, 74. See also Sun-
diata, “Capitalism and Slavery,” 121-130, 124.
51. Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic
History and Culture.” Mann, who criticizes also the “extraordinary myopia” of authors
who ignore Africa’s role in the formation of the Atlantic, writes that Bailyn also under-
plays the reflections of African American intellectuals on the Atlantic World. Coates,
53. Defining the TTIP, a researcher of a Dutch think-tank report states: “It is more
than a game-changer, but the best chance the transatlantic West has to advance a liberal
world order for the 21st century.” Van Ham, The Geopolitics o/TTIP.
54. Edward Snowden’s revelations show a more dense and transoceanic core within
the “Atlantic civilization” geopolitics. To the displeasure of France and Germany’s lead-
ers, it was widely publicized that the US National Security Agency shares signal intelli-
gence data only with Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, the so-
called “Five Eyes.” The US-UK coalition corresponds to the geopolitical bloc that French
politicians and intellectuals defined, since the mid-nineteenth century, as “les pays Anglo-
Saxons.” By that time, the middle of the nineteenth century, the cultural and regional
definition of “Latin America” emerged in France as an opposite transnational bloc led
by Paris.
55. The issue was also raised in a debate with Paul Gilroy in the Institut des Hautes
50
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
56. Gilroy, OAtlantico Negro, 10-11. Differences between North and South Atlantic his-
tory have been studied by several Brazilian historians, including Joao Jose Reis, Roqui-
naldo Ferreira, Manolo Florentino, Flavio Gomes, and Mariana Candido. In addition, see
the discussion of the seminal works of Charles Boxer and Pierre Verger in this article.
58. Canny and Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850.
59. Eltis, “Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”; To-
duction to The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, 1:1-4. The authors argue that
1850 marked the beginning of Latin America globalization, ignoring the abrupt end of
the three-centuries-long African deportation to South America and Cuba. On African
history, see Inikori, “Africa and the Globalization Process.” Although Inikori aptly states
that “for all practical purposes, Brazil was an extension of Africa during the period in
question” (79), he does not mention the end of the Brazilian Atlantic slave trade in 1850.
61. Law, “International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade”;
62. The embarkments to the Americas between 1841-1850 and 1851-1860 fell from
455,755 to 134,135 individuals (-70.5 percent). To Brazil the decline was from 400,016
to 6,899 individuals (-98.2 percent). From i860 until the end of slave trade in Cuba, and
in the Atlantic (1867), 37,124 more deportees would cross the Ocean. TSTD, accessed
October 2013.
63. In his insightful essay on Argentina and South Africa, Philip Curtin uses the
expression “South Atlantic World.” Curtin, “Location in History.” See also K. G. Davies,
The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century. The book describes the British, French,
and Dutch as well as, notably, West Africa, but it also eschews, Mexico, Cuba, and the
Spanish possessions in the North Atlantic. Furthermore, as noted by Pauline Croft, the
exclusion of the South Atlantic connection limits the scope of Davies’s analysis. See Croft,
64. See Fr. J. Mathias Delgado in de Cadornega, Histo'ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas
escrita no ano de 1681, 1:98, n. i; Heintze, “Angola nas garras do trafico de escravos —As
guerras do Ndongo, 1611-1630,” 15-16; John C. Miller, “The Imbangala and the Chronol-
ogy of Early Central African History,” 568 n. 73; Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 108-112;
66. Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria Ajficana, 2nd series (Africa Ocidental oeste) [MMA 2 ],
1:277-286; De Witte, “Les Bulles pontificales et l’expansion portugaise au XVe siecle,”
51
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
67. In another illustration of the disciplinary bias that obliterate South Atlantic his-
tory, John Thornton, one of the leading specialists on Kongo history, ignores the connec-
tions between the South Atlantic wars and the essential role of the militias from Brazil
XVII e XVIII).”
69. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, map 26, 47.
73. Pardo, “A Comparative Study of the Portuguese Colonies of Angola and Brasil
75. Gray, “Benin and the Europeans, 1485-18 gy by A. F. C. Ryder; L’ancien royaume du
76. Referring to the anniversary of 1140 (when Afonso Henriques create the indepen-
dent kingdom of Portugal) and 1640 (the Restoration of the Portuguese Crown under Bra-
ganza’s dynasty), the celebrations were entitled “The Double Centenary of the Nationality.”
Most of the 482 papers presented were published in the Proceedings of the Conference,
Congresso do Mundo Portugues, 19 vols. (Lisbon: Comissao Executiva dos Centenarios, 1940).
On the ideological context of the Conference, see Calafate Ribeiro, “Empire, Colonial
77. Renamed Agenda Geral do Ultramar in 1951. The prominent Portuguese com-
munity in Rio de Janeiro held studies on overseas history. Commemorating the centenary
of Brazil’s Independence (1922), the “Gabinete Portugues de Leitura,” a Portuguese Li-
brary and Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro since 1837, funded the Historia da Colonizagao
Port uguesa do Brasil, 3 vols. (Porto: Litografia Nacional, 1921-1924). Edited by Carlos Mal-
heiros Dias, the work had among its authors Duarte Leite, Oliveira Lima, Pedro Azevedo,
and Jaime Cortesao. In Portugal as in Brazil, Salazarists and anti-Salarists shared the
same admiration for Portuguese colonial expansion. Hence, Bertho Conde, a Brazilian
antifascist journalist, lectured in the Gabinete on Salvador de Sa’s 1648 expedition to
Angola. Conde, “Sobre a restauragao de Angola.” During the 1930s, the Sociedade Lu-
so-Africana do Rio de Janeiro published the Boletim da Sociedade Luso-Ajricana. See Paulo,
memoria da resistencia.”
52
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
78. During the nineteenth century, Brazil’s independence inspired timely reflections
to Lisbon’s colonial policy, chiefly in Angola. See Martins, 0 Brasil e as colonias portuguesas;
79. Prestage, Correspondence diplomatica de Francisco de Sousa Coutinho durante a sua em-
baixada em Holanda, translated as The Diplomatic Relations of Portugal with France, England,
hollandez no Brasil.
81. Lucio de Azevedo, Cartas do pe. Antonio Vieira and Historia de Antonio Vieira.
83. Cortesao, Alexandre de Gusmao e 0 Tratado de Madrid, Raposo Tauares e a/ormagao terri-
torial do Brasil, and 0 Ultramar Portugues depois da Restauragao. The author also dismissed the
“fascist Iberism,” strengthened by Franco’s victory in Spain and backed by salazarist
authors, which downplayed the historical antagonism between Madrid and Lisbon during
85. Directed by the Liceu Salvador Correia de Sa’s staff in Luanda, the journal Arquiuos
86. Involved in a monarchist plot, Manuel Ruela Pombo (1888-1960) left Portugal to
Brazil in 1912. Settled as a parish priest in Sapucaf, Minas Gerais, he wrote on Alvarenga
Peixoto (1744-1793). A local poet and lawyer, Alvarenga Peixoto was involved in the 1789
Independentist Conspiracy and was deported to Angola in 1792. Ruela Pombo completed
his research in Luanda; see “Inconfidencia mineira 1789.” He is one of the first authors
to research at Luanda’s Governo Geral, Camara Municipal, and Diocesan archives; Ruela
Pombo, Cinzas de Lisboa, 5-6; de Paiva, Biohihliografa do Padre Ruela Pombo.
87. The Spiritan journal Portugal em Africa published the second volume of Cardone-
ga’s work in 1902. Later annotated and edited by the Angola’s missionary Jose Mathias
Delgado (1865-1932), the first volume of Cadornega’s work was formerly printed in
chapters in Diogo Caao, 1931-1935. All three volumes were later published by the Agencia
Geral das Colonias: de Cadornega, Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas escrita no ano de 1681,
3 vols.
88. Hair, “An Inquiry Concerning a Portuguese Editor and a Guinea Text.”
89. Heintze, “Antonio de Oliveira de Cadornegas Geschichtswerk”; Mogo Demaret,
“Portugueses e Africanos em Angola no seculo XVII.”
92. Manuel Murias (1900-1960) played a key role both in the setting of historical re-
search and editions and in the organization of the 1940s Congresso do M undo Port ugues. He
53
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
directed the Arquivo Historico Colonial (later Arquivo Historico Ultramarino) and was
influential in the Agenda Geral das Colonias. Such institutions mandated most of the
research on Portuguese Africa and Asia at that time. Angola’s Commissary of the 1940
commemorations, Ralph Delgado, was asked by Angola’s governor to write A Famosa e
Historico Bermuda — Catalogo dos Gouernadores 1779-1940. Later Delgado published his His-
94. De Paiva Manso, Bahia de Lourenco Marques; Garrido, 0 Visconde de Paiua Manso.
95. In 1876, Leopold II founded the Association Internationale Africaine in Brussels.
By that time, Paiva Manso was writing a history of the Congo. His premature death in
1875 led to the posthumous publication of his collected documents as Histo'ria do Congo.
Later, Theophile Simar, a noted Belgian historian of Central Africa, wrote that the “hasty
publication” of Paiva Manso’s work “had no other goal than to prove to the European
powers the validity of the Portuguese claims.” Simar, “Les sources de 1 ’histoire du Congo
anterieurement a 1’epoque des grandes decouvertes.”
tantisme au Congo.
100. The Portuguese Church eventually lost (1953) guardianship over the Indian dio-
ceses (the “Padroado do Oriente”), as Lisbon rule over the remnants of the Estado da
India ended in 1961. Documenta$ao Para a Histdria das Missoes do Padroado Portugues do Oriente:
India 1548-1550, 10 vols. (Lisbon: Agenda Geral das Colonias, 1947-1958), i:v.
104. Anon., Civiliiando Angola e Congo os missionaries do Espirito Santo no padroado espiri-
ID=82 (accessed September 2013). Brasio’s numerous articles and essays are reunited in
Histo'ria e missiologia.
107. See Birmingham, “Merchants and Missionaries in Angola,” and Plecard, “‘Eu
sou Americano.’”
108. Consul Carnauba to the Brazilian Ministery of Foreign Affairs, September 1961;
see Aragon, “Chancellery Sepulchers,” 132.
54
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Aiencastro
no. On Portugal’s African studies, see Maino, “Pour une genealogie de 1 ’Africanisme
! Portugais.”
in. Alden, The Making of an Enterprise. This bias is not shared by Fr. Francisco Leite de
Faria, who wrote important works on the Capuchin missionaries on both sides of the
South Atlantic. See, for instance, Os barbadinhosfranceses e a restaurafao pernambucana and
112. Murilo de Carvalho, A Formafdo das Almas, chap. 3; Nivia de Lima e Fonseca, “A
Inconfidencia Mineira e Tiradentes vistos pela imprensa”; de Castro Vieira Christo,
“Gonzaga bordando.”
113. Cabral de Mello, Rubro ueio.
114. Gonsalves de Mello, Joao Fernandes Vieira, 330-356; the book has 495 pages. After
his governorship in Angola, Fernandes Vieira followed closely from Recife the events
in Congo and Angola, during the governorship of his fellow commander Andre Vidal de
Negreiros (1659-1665) and beyond.
115. Varnhagen, Histdria geral do Brasil. The suppressed section (1st ed., 37) referred
to Joao Fernandes Veira and Andre Vidal de Negreiros’s governments in Angola (1658—
1666).
117. Luiz Alves, “A Questao do Elemento Servil.” Later, Leslie Bethell renewed the
studies on England and the Brazilian slave trade; Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave
Trade.
118. The issue remains pertinent; see Weindl, “The Asiento de Negros and Inter-
national Law.”
124. In fact, Affonso Taunay and Edmundo Correia Lopes had already initiated such
data clarification; Taunay, Subsidios para a Histo'ria do Trajico Africano no Brasil.
125 . Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
126. First published in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1940), the book had a Por-
tuguese edition with a more explicitly and programmatic title 0 mundo que 0 portugues
criou: Aspectos das relates sociais e de cultura do Brasil com Portugal e as colonias portuguesas. In
his preface, Antonio Sergio, a liberal and anti-Salazarist historian and writer who knew
55
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Portuguese Africa well, comments Freyre’s ideas and Portuguese colonization without
mentioning Portugal’s and Brazil’s slavery or the slave trade.
the Sorbonne, Pinto de Andrade was also an editor of the journal Presence Africaine. As
such, in 1956 he organized the “Congres des Ecrivains et des Artistes Noirs,” which gath-
ered many African and African Americans intellectuals at the Sorbonne, including Frantz
Fanon and Marcelino dos Santos, one of the founders of the FRELIMO (1956); the Mart-
iniquese Aime Cesaire and Edouard Glissant; the Haitians Jean Price-Mars, Rene De-
pestre, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis; the American Richard Wright; and the Senegalese
Leopold Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop, among others.
129. Bezerra de Menezes, 0 Brasil e 0 mundo Asio-africano, 336, 338.
130. Rampinelli, As duas faces da moeda, 59-64.
134. Selcher, “Brazilian Relations with Portuguese Africa in the Context of the Elu-
sive ‘Luso-Brazilian Community’”; de Almeida, “Do alinhamento recalcitrante a colabo-
ra^ao relutante.”
1600-1/00, 211.
136. Carneiro became royal cosmographer in 1631, under the Habsburg Crown, and
again, in 1641, under the Braganza. Mariz de Carneiro, “Roteiro de Portugal pera o Brazil,
Rio da Prata, Angola e S. Thome, segundo os pilotos antigos e modernos, agora a quinta
vez impresso,” in Reqimento de pilotos e Roteiro da navega^a m e conquistas do Brasil, Angola,
137. Richard de Silva, “The Portuguese East India Company 1628-1633,” 181-182.
138. Probably 100,000 African and Afro-Brazilian slaves were exported from Brazil to
the Rio de la Plata in the period 1742-1812. Bauss, “Rio Grande do sul in the Portuguese
Empire.”
143. Those topics are still explored by today’s researchers. Caillet-Bois, “Roberto Levil-
lier (1886-1969)”; Sabor Vila, “Jose Torre Revello (1893-1964)”; Socolow, “Recent His-
56
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
144. Tannenbaum, “La Trata de Negros en Rio de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII by
146. Alice P. Canabrava’s thesis was presented to the Universidade de Sao Paulo
(where Braudel taught in 1935-1937) in 1942. Her book was published two years later:
0 Comercio Portugues no Rio da Prata 1580-1640. Braudel, “Du Potosi a Buenos Aires.”
147. Around 1850 Buenos Aires had a community of 15,000 Africans. Chamosa, “‘To
Honor the Ashes ofTheir Forebears.’”
150. Weyland Usanna, “The Absence of an African Presence in Argentina and the
Dominican Republic.”
151. Cuvelier, Missionnaires Capucins des missions du Congo et de 1
’
Angola du XVIIe et
XVIIIe siecles. In a recent review on the history of Congo, a Congolese author regrets
that the ancient Portuguese sources have been used only “as an appendix” of mission-
ary history, given that they contain important data on Congolese social life between
the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries; Ndaywel E Nziem, “L’historiographie con-
golaise.”
153. I got that impression from reading the obituary of Louis Jadin written by his
brother, the distinguished microbiologist Jean-Baptiste Jadin, in the Academie Royale des
again in governmental school between 1922 and 1948. Morabito, “Riva, Silvia.”
155. Ngemba Ntima, La methode d' evangelisation des re'demptoristes beiges au B as-Congo
(1899-1919), 294; Whitehead and Vansina, “An Interview with Jan Vansina.”
156. Cuvelier, “Traditions Congolaises” and L’Ancien Royaume de Congo; Cuvelier and
Jadin, L’Ancien Congo d’apres les archives romaines 1518-1640; and four works by Louis Jadin:
“Les Flamands au Congo et en Angola au XVIIeme siecle”; “Rivalries luso-neerlandaises
57
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
158. Biographie Coloniale Beige, vol. 2. Several other authors also contributed to this
159. Ndaywel e Nziem, Obenga, and Salmon, Histoire generate du Congo n-18; Denis
,
et al., “Regards changeants dans une continuity d’interet”; Van Damme-Linseele, “In
Memoriam: Fr. Francois Bontinck: 1920-2005.”
160. The first complete French translation of the widely publicized edition by Pigafetta
of the Portuguese merchant Duarte Lopez report on Congo was Bal, Description du royaume
du Congo et des contre'es environnantes, par Filippo Pigafetta et Duarte Lopez (1591), published in
1962. Bal was a renowed Walloon activist writer and a professor at the Universite Lova-
nium at Leopoldville. His commented edition of Description du royaume du Congo with 393 ,
notes covering sixty-five pages, was considered “magisterial” by Cornevin and drew at-
tention back to Pigafetta’s work; see Cornevin, “Le Congo ex-belge.” Another important
work also elaborated at the Universite Lovanium is Bontinck, La fondation de la mission des
Capuchins au Royaume du Congo (1648), from 1966, translating and commenting on Fr.
162. On mestizaje in the South Atlantic, see also de Alencastro, “Mulattos in Brazil
and Angola.”
163. Boxer, SalvadordeSa and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1686; Mauro, Le Por-
tugal et I’Atlantique au XVIIe siede. Through the title of his book, Mauro, like Chaunu before
him (Seville et I’Atlantique), underlined his emphasis on the broader historical space rather
than anachronic territorial entities. Later, on the insistence of his Portuguese editors, he
introduced “Brasil” in the title of the Portuguese translation, Portugal, Brasil e 0 Atlantico.
164. In 1950, two years before Salvador de Sa, Boxer published the revised edition of
his commanding book on the cultural exchanges between the Dutch and the Japanese,
first published in 1936: Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600-1850. “A beautiful study of the nippon-
neerlandese transculturation” (1177), wrote Pierre Chaunu on this book; Chaunu, “Bresil
et Atlantique au XVIIe siecle.” Despite all of the debates on world history, Boxer’s works
still pay the price of their enlightened cosmopolitanism. Thus some researchers of Asian
history ignore his contribution to the Atlantic history, and vice versa. In his essay on
Boxer’s life and work, the Dutch historian Frank Lequin, a specialist of the Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie and modern Japan —and a Boxer disciple —does not mention
Salvador de Sa, which, in the words of another Boxer disciple, Francis Dutra, “might argu-
ably be claimed to be his best book.” Dutra, “Charles Boxer’s Salvador de Sa and the Struggle
for Brazil and Angola Revisited”; Lequin, “In Memoriam Charles Ralph Boxer F.B.A., 8 March
1904-27 April 2000.”
165 . Birmingham, quoted by Cummins, in West and Cummins, A List of the Writings of
58
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
166. Emily Hahn wrote a noteworthy travel journal, Congo Solo (1933), and a novel,
With Naked Foot (1934), sketching contemporary colonialist practices in West Central
Africa. In his introduction to the 2011 edition of Congo Solo, Ken Cuthbertson, a biogra-
pher and admirer of Emily Hahn, describes Charles Boxer’s adventurous life and prolific
works in a short and peculiar way: “an eccentric English army officer turned professor of
Portuguese colonial history.”
167. Magalhaes Godinho, Documentos sobre a Expansao Portuguese!; Histo'ria Econo'mica e
para a Geograjia e Economia do Saara e Guine; A Ezoaomia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos; and
L’economie de I’empire Portugal aux XVe etXVIe siedes. See also Cardoso, “Vitorino Magalhaes
Godinho and the Annales School.”
168. Mauro, “De Madere a Mazagan.” Later, developing Braudel’s ideas, Mauro pro-
posed a typology of networks of maritime trade and land forming “Mediterranean seas”
in several parts of the world. But he does not consider the Bahia-Bight of Benin ex-
changes, which he discussed at length as a jury member of Pierre Verger’s doctoral thesis
when ideas of Western civilization were large influences on scholarship these issues.”
The assertion may apply to Verlinden but not to Mauro, whose book had quite different
173. On different occasions, Frederic Mauro and Pierre Chaunu made the same remark.
War and Price, alike other Hamilton’s works, had admiring reviews in the Annales. Febvre
commented on Hamilton’s findings in the fifth issue of the journal. Febvre, “L’afflux des
a parallel with his own research on Catalonia. Vilar, “Histoire des prix, histoire generale.” So
Braudel makes a “mise au point” with a respectful but moderate commentary on War and
Price, stressing that Spain’s decline should be analyzed within the global context of the Gen-
eral Crisis. Braudel, “De l’histoire d’Espagne a l’histoire des prix,” 202-206. Other refer-
ences on the prices and wages debate included Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the
Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, and, closer to Braudel’s disciples and the Annales School,
Jean Meuvret. Such debates derived from the studies on the cyclical model of economic
crises and the Great Depression held by the International Committee of History of Price.
59
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
174. Mauro, “Article de E. J. Hobsbawm sur la crise du XVIIe siecle.” Mauro’s main
critique of Hobsbawm’s essay relies on Hamilton’s analysis: the central role of monies
and credit in the transformations of the 1600s.
175. Le Portugal et PAtlantique was not translated in Brazil. Writing about the disregard
of French historians on Adantic history, Cecile Vidal omits Mauro’s works. Vidal, “La
nouvelle histoire adantique en France” and “Pour une histoire globale du monde atlan-
1648.”
et XVIIe siecles. L’or et le poivre. Route de Guinee et route du Cap,” 2 vols., as “these
principale,” and Les finances de PEtat portugais des Indes orientales, du XVIe au debut du XVIIe
178. His data and analysis of the Spanish asientos contracts, as well the figures previ-
ously estimated by Mauro, formed the basis of Curtin’s global calculations on the Adan-
tic slave trade during the seventeenth century. Huguette and Chaunu, Seville et PAtlantique
preted by the author. See Medeiros dos Santos, “Relates de Angola com o Rio de Janeiro
1736-1808,” table 1.
180. See also Mauro, Des produits et des hommes, chaps. 2 and 3.
184. In 1959, the Reuue Fran^aise d’Histoire des Colonies, founded in 1913 by the French
Ministry of Colonies, changed its name to Revue Frangaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer. Robert
Delavignette, a former colonial governor, explained in an editorial the choice of the new
title, arguing that in its new issues the Revue would evolve toward “a history of the accul-
turation where would be measured the contributions of the different (countries) mem-
bers of the (French) Community, in the light of their respective historical traditions.”
185. The chair was created in 1905 under the aegis of the Union Coloniale Frangaise,
a powerful colonialist lobby. Brunschwig, “Le parti colonial frangais”; Bancel, “Que faire
des postcolonial studies?”; Moniot, “Une ego-histoire des etudes africaines.” See also
Schaub, “La categorie ‘etudes coloniales’ est-elle indispensable?” and “The Case for a
Broader Atlantic History.” Ironically, the generalizations around the field of postcolonial
60
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
studies have induced some colleagues at the Sorbonne to envision again a field study on
“colonial history.”
logical issues, the Ford Foundation, then the most important funding agency in area
South Africa, and Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), which was openly supportive of
African nationalist movements, had much less sponsorship. Gershenhorn, “‘Notan Ac-
ademic Affair’”; Martin, “The Rise of African Studies (USA) and the Transnational Study
of Africa.”
187. Brunschwig, “Un faux probleme.” See also Newbury, “Contradictions at the
Heart of the Canon.” Jan Vansina had already published his innovative study on Rwanda
based on oral history: revolution du royaume du Rwanda des origines a lg 60. Likewise, in the
first issue of the Journal of African History he published his programmatic articles on the
Bakuba, laying the methodological foundations of oral history research in African stud-
ies. Vansina, “Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba — I. Methods” and “Recording
the Oral History of the Bakuba — II. Results”; Vansina and Wright, Oral Tradition; Vansina,
190. Balandier’s essay “La situation coloniale” (1951), which Copans considered a
“founding text” on the study of colonized societies in Africa, and his book L’Ajrique am-
bigue (1957) influenced two generations of Francophone African writers, including V. Y.
191. Randles, L’ancien royaume du Congo des origines a la fn du XIXe siecle, 334-337,
340-344.
192. Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola. Randies’s remark refers to the previous
61
PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
200. Vellut, “L’Afrique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles.” His review concerns volume 4 of
205. Flux et reflux de la traite des negres entre le Golfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos os Santos,
XVle-XIXe siecles (1968). The book is the printed version of his Doctorat de Troisieme
Cycle presented in 1966 at the Sorbonne. The thesis was criticized by the jury, mainly by
Braudel, for the long quotations of documents without analysis or comments. In fact,
Verger received the degree assez bien (equivalent to cum Iaude), then the lowest citation for
the French doctorate (personal testimony of Frederic Mauro, another member of the
jury). Reviewers and today’s readers of Flux et rejlux unknowingly agree with Braudel’s
assertions.
208. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society; de Queiros Mat-
209. Deschamps, Histoire generale de I’Afrique noire, de Madagascar, et des archipels, 1:221,
1:232.
210. Butel, Histoire de I’Atlantique; Butel, The Atlantic (British translation of Histoire de
213. Walvin, “Why Did the British Abolish the Slave Trade?”
214. Of the 10,538,227 enslaved individuals who arrived in the Americas from the
beginning of the sixteenth century, 2,633,403 disembarked between 1808 and 1866,
mostly in Brazil (1,842,573), Cuba (616,908), and the French Caribbean (154,133). TSTD
(accessed November 2013).
215. Boxer, “Flux et reflux.” On the controversy about Boxer’s views on race relations
in the Portuguese empire see the thoughtful analysis by Curto, “The Debate on Race Re-
lations in the Portuguese Empire and Charles R. Boxer’s Position.” See also Cummins
62
the south Atlantic, past and present Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
and De Sousa Rebelo, “The Controversy over Charles Boxer’s Race Relations in the Por-
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