Enslaving Connections

This unique collection of twelve essays by internationally known scholars deals with the important, but underexplored, topic of the transatlantic linkages between western Africa and Brazil during the era of the slave trade (c. 1600-1850). Brazil received more enslaved Africans (approximately 4.5 million) than any other part of the Americas—ten times as many as North America, and more than all of the Caribbean and North America combined. The forced shipment of millions of Africans to the Americas, where their enslavement became the basis of intense exploitation, profoundly influenced the development of the American societies that used slaves, the African societies from which the victims originated, and the European nations centrally involved in colonizing the Americas. Transatlantic slavery and the forces that produced its formal abolition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were clearly vital in helping to define the identities of both black and white people, and in shaping European colonialism and imperialism. These factors have left legacies of racism and division with important social consequences. Divided into three major parts, the collection focuses in the first section on the Portuguese-Brazilian slave trade. The second section examines the impact of western Africans on the making of colonial and postindependence Brazil. The final section explores the effects of Brazil and Afro-Brazilians on western Africa. This important volume of cutting-edge research and analysis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of slavery in the Americas.