I am a professor of African history at the Royal Military College of Canada, where I teach courses on European colonialism and early and modern Africa. I earned a PhD in history from York University in Canada and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before joining RMC. My research interests include slavery, slave trade, legitimate commerce, and intercultural marriages in Luanda and its hinterland. I have published articles and book chapters and co-edited (with Paul E. Lovejoy) Slavery, Memory and Citizenship. My first book, Slave Trade and Abolition was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in January 2021.
I wrote...
Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda
Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked.
Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes operating in the South Atlantic during the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition reveals the strategies adopted by slavers in face of the ban on slave exports in 1836. Oliveira shows that large-scale merchants survived the end of the slave trade becoming the main investors in the "new" trade in tropical commodities, including ivory, wax, coffee, cotton and sugar.
This book is a mandatory read for anyone interested in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. In Way of Death, the late Joseph C. Milller examines the South Atlantic node of the slave trade within the context of the rise of merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. Miller explores the connections between Angola, Portugal, and Brazil through the experiences of Africans and slave traders of Portuguese, Brazilian, and Luso-African origins. In this book, Miller advances his now much-debated theory of the expansion of the slave frontier eastwards into the deep interior. Scholars interested in the slave trade from Angola agree that Way of Death is a landmark study both methodologically and theoretically. Miller was able to mine primary sources in the Angolan archives in a time when the country experienced war and authorities were suspicious of researchers.
With extraordinary skill, Joseph C. Miller explores the complex relationships among the separate economies of Africa, Europe, and the South Atlantic that collectively supported the slave trade. He places the grim history of the trade itself within the context of the rise of merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. Throughout, Miller illuminates the experiences of the slaves themselves, reconstructing what can be known of their sufferings at the hands of their buyers and sellers.
In Enslaving Spirits José C. Curto relies on the Atlantic history approach to demonstrate how alcohol linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The book looks at the role of foreign alcoholic beverages in the slave trade from Luanda and its hinterland between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The author follows the trajectory of Portuguese wine and the Brazilian alcohol known as geribita in the acquisition of captives to meet the demand for enslaved labor in the Americas. The reader will also learn a great deal about indigenous alcoholic beverages, as well as how the introduction of foreign intoxicants changed consumer partners in West Central Africa. Non-native merchants and African elites used foreign alcoholic beverages as trade goods, presents, and symbols of prestige through the era of the transatlantic slave trade.
This volume deals with imported alcohol at Luanda and its hinterland, where it was heavily used to acquire captives for the Atlantic slave trade. Aside from highlighting the complexities of this singular economic component of Atlantic slaving, its focus on changing West -Central African alcohol consumption patterns through the importation of foreign intoxicants reveals an important element of the social history of African societies before the modern colonial period.
In this book, Roquinaldo A. Ferreira traces the trajectory of free and enslaved individuals directly and indirectly connected to the slave trade from Angola in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at the life stories of merchants and ordinary men and women in the ports of Luanda and Benguela he reveals the movements of peoples, ideas, capital, cultural practices, and commodities that shaped the South Atlantic World. Ferreira also demonstrates that the Portuguese incorporated indigenous institutions and cultural practices evidencing that cultural exchanges worked both ways. The book is a fine example of the use of microhistory to recover the experiences of subaltern individuals, including the enslaved, women, and criminals.
This book argues that Angola and Brazil were connected, not separated, by the Atlantic Ocean. Roquinaldo Ferreira focuses on the cultural, religious and social impacts of the slave trade on Angola. Reconstructing biographies of Africans and merchants, he demonstrates how cross-cultural trade, identity formation, religious ties and resistance to slaving were central to the formation of the Atlantic world. By adding to our knowledge of the slaving process, the book powerfully illustrates how Atlantic slaving transformed key African institutions, such as local regimes of forced labor that predated and coexisted with Atlantic slaving and made them fundamental features of the…
The Angolan southern town of Benguela was the third-largest port of embarkation of captives in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, after Luanda and Ouidah (in modern-day Benin). In spite of its importance as a slaving port, An African Slaving Port was the first English-language book on Benguela. In this book, Mariana P. Candido traces the history and development of the port from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century highlighting the connections between Benguela, Portugal, Brazil, and the Caribbean. The book contributes to the scholarship on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies looking at changes in consumption patterns, cultural elements, and institutions on the coast as well as in interior regions. Furthermore, the book contributes to engender the history of the slave trade from Angola by evidencing the role of local women merchants known as donas as independent traders and intermediaries between foreign traders and African suppliers inland.
This book traces the history and development of the port of Benguela, the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa, from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. In discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies, Mariana P. Candido explores the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states and the emergence of new states. Placing Benguela in an Atlantic perspective, this study shows how events in the Caribbean and Brazil affected…
In this book, Daniel B. Domingues da Silva traces the origins of the enslaved men, women, and children shipped from West Central African ports as well as their methods of enslavement. Silva has been part of the group of scholars who organized the Voyages, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. In this book, he draws upon archival research and the quantitative data found in the database to analyze the scale and organization of the forced migration of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Silva demonstrates that an important proportion of the enslaved Africans exported to the Americas in the nineteenth century originated from coastal areas. Therefore, his findings bring into question the theory of an expanding slave frontier inland.
The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780-1867 traces the inland origins of slaves leaving West Central Africa at the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival sources from Angola, Brazil, England, and Portugal, Daniel B. Domingues da Silva explores not only the origins of the slaves forced into the trade but also the commodities for which they were exchanged and their methods of enslavement. Further, the book examines the evolution of the trade over time, its organization, the demographic profile of the population transported, the enslavers' motivations to participate in this activity, and the Africans'…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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