The best books about Angola 📚

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… show more.

I found this book helpful because my books are set in Angola. This travel guide gave specific details about the terrain, climate, and geographic challenges of life in Angola. A travel guide such as this one is invaluable to anyone considering a short-term trip to Africa. This particular book even offered help with conversational language terms and gave thorough and interesting information that helped give my books the authenticity I wanted.  

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… show more.

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… show more.