Widespread social commitment to slavery and inequality (Luanda and Rio de Janeiro, 1798-1833)

Roberto Guedes & Ana Paula Bôscoro

The city of Luanda was the greatest slave-exporting port in Africa in the Modern Age, oriented to meeting the immense demand created by slavery in the Americas, especially Brazil. The captives brought from the slave frontiers of Western Central Africa waited for embarkment in Luanda —just as in other slave ports (Miller, 1988, ch. 5 and part II; Candido, 2013, ch. 4; Sparks, 2014, ch. 5)—, where the adults were called cabeças (heads) and the children, crias (offspring). These terms were used even during the captive’s baptism at the Parish of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Our Lady of Remedies). For its part, Rio de Janeiro was the most important slave disembarkation port^[2] during the 18th and 19th centuries (Florentino, 1995; TSTD). From there, the so-called escravos novos, the recently arrived Africans, were redistributed to the South and Southeastern regions of Brazil. Upon taking possession of the newly arrived slaves at their final destination, their masters re-baptized them.^[3] Therefore, baptisms of cabeças and crias in Luanda, the Atlantic crossing, the redistribution of newly arrived African slaves from Rio de Janeiro, and re-baptism of slaves in Brazil were constituent parts of a global history^[4] that intersected religion, trade, and slavery.

The transatlantic slave trade is a classic theme among scholars, but there is still ground for advancement by comparing the business operation in Luanda and Rio de Janeiro. What was the market share of the various slave traders operating in each city? How many people were involved in the business? Who were the major traders? What were the similarities between the markets of the two cities?

In order to answer these questions, we resorted to three baptismal record books from the Parish of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (1797-1804), located in the cidade baixa (lower town), where the harbor was also situated. Between 1770 and 1786, all baptisms of cabeças and crias took place in Remédios, since the Parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of Conception), found in the cidade alta (upper town), only baptized children.^[5] During this period, the total of children baptized in both parishes was 4,604. However, when these children and their parents were slaves, they were not destined to the transatlantic market; they are thereby not within our scope. The baptisms of cabeças and crias, on the other hand, did allude to the transatlantic slave trade.^[6] Altogether, the 3,888 baptismal records from the Remédios parish comprise 52,093 cabeças and 1,593 crias, totaling 53,686 captives baptized between March 1798^[7] and June 1804 (around six years and three months). From this point on, we will refer to both cabeças and crias simply as cabeças, since they are the majority among the captives found in the documentation. A baptismal record could comprehend one or hundreds of cabeças, but in most records there were only a few.

For Rio de Janeiro, we have resorted to five codices of dispatches of newly arrived African slaves (despachos de escravos novos) produced by the Polícia da Corte (Court Police), and we have chosen to emphasize the period between 1825 and 1830.^[8] Altogether, these sources count 114,854 escravos novos sold in the South-Southeast axis of Brazil. Each dispatch could represent, approximately, a sale of newly arrived Africans for some location outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. For example, “João Afonso de Moraes dispatched to Minas thirty-nine unbranded escravos novos, belonging to Desembargador (Judge) Manoel Inácio de Melo e Souza”.^[9]

It should be noted that there are inaccuracies and gaps in the aforementioned corpora: having been produced in a pre-statistical period, they do not contain records for every trader operating in each city, every cabeça shipped from Luanda, or every escravo novo leaving Rio (Marcílio, 2000). Likewise, we do not know whether the owners of the cabeças and escravos novos operated by themselves, through intermediaries, and/or in commercial partnerships, nor is it possible to assess the financial sources, etc. However, the documents provide a unique opportunity to scrutinize comparatively the slave market share for each city, by informing the number of baptized cabeças and the name of their owner (in the case of baptismal records) and the names of the escravos novos and their seller/owner/guarantor (in the case of dispatches). The two types of sources— baptismal records and dispatches— lead to similar results.

Though the slave trade seems to have involved thousands of people on each side of the Atlantic, the market was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of traders (Miller, 1988, ch. 6). Thus, in addition to producing captives, the activity created a hierarchy within the mercantile community and, consequently, within free people themselves, since the access to the slave market was very unequal. However, the broad participation of different social segments indicates the dissemination of the captive market in both cities, exposing the social acceptance of enslavement and social inequality among free persons. Hence, the trade of people was more than the mere exchange of goods for captives in an integrated mercantile system: it also engendered a kind of trafficking way of life (modus vivendi traficante) that was inoffensive to a large segment of society, with its broad combination of social groups. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case.

There was no contradiction in a slave-trading business that was at once concentrated and widely supported by different social groups. Indeed, its acceptance stemmed from its openness to various social sectors (Bôscaro, 2021, chapters 2 and 4). Free or freed individuals and families, companies and mercantile groups, religious and secular institutions: all of them took part as they could. The “flux and reflux” between Africa and Brazil through “the river called Atlantic” (Verger, 1987; Costa e Silva, 2003) was also based on the moral backing for human trafficking.^[10]

Having specified the object, the sources and the perspective of the investigation, we have divided the analysis into three sections. First, we have attempted to determine the structure of the market of cabeças in Luanda, then the structure of the market for escravos novos in Rio de Janeiro, and, finally, concluded with a brief comparison of both markets.

Luanda: from one to 519 cabeças and seven crias^[11]

On March 6, 1804, a priest baptized in a single ceremony “519 cabeças and seven crias belonging to Colonel Anselmo da Fonseca Coutinho”.^[12] The Luanda-born Coutinho was one of the largest slave traders in the city between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, having been responsible for 5% of all captives embarked in Luanda between 1768 and 1806 (Silva, 2010, 55). Similarly, he owned 7% of the cabeças baptized between 1798 and 1804.^[13] Coutinho was at the top of the rank of slave traffickers, but was certainly not the only one. However, the vast majority operated on a much smaller scale.

Despite the competition that characterized the slave-trading activity (Miller, 1988; Silva, 2010), the baptismal records inform 1,071 different names of cabeças owners in Luanda.^[14] The large amount of people that took part in the business suggests a very wide diversity within the market of cabeças: from men like Colonel Coutinho, who had 3,778 heads baptized; passing through a “sailor” who owned six cabeças; to a “Camossanda black man” or a “squad corporal (cabo de esquadra) nicknamed Cahengo”, who owned one cabeça each^[15]. Thus, great businessmen shared the market with occasional sellers like Annamaboe, for example (Sparks, 2014, chapter 5).

How each merchant participated in the business and the rhythm of baptisms varied according to the arrival of captives from the interior, as well as the imminent departure of ships to the Americas. For example, on November 20, 1771, the governor of Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, wrote a letter to the captain of the Presídio^[16] of Ambaca to warn “Pedro de Matos and all of Matias da Costa’s correspondents that, by December 15, [they should] send to this capital [Luanda] as many cabeças as they could before the ship’s departure”.^[17] There seems to have existed an organized information network between the coastal cities (Luanda and Benguela) and the presídios in the interior, so as to quickly load soon-to-depart ships with slaves. Luanda, therefore, hastened the supply of cabeças from the interior.

However, some commercial transactions took longer, owing to other facets of the African circuit prior to setting sail for Brazil. On December 1 of that year, 1771, the same governor sent a letter to the captain-major of Benguela (a port located south of Luanda), ordering him to take measures regarding a ship owned by captain Domingos Furtado de Mendonça. A partner of Mendonça’s had insinuated that the ship “carried 800 cabeças, 500 of its own and 300 belonging to [other traders of] the local mercantile community (desta praça)”.^[18] The Benguela transaction was considered unjust and harmful to Mendonça, as the vessel’s delay at the port would increase the risk of damage to its equipment and rigging, leading to the death of captives and disrupting tax collection by the Fazenda Real (Royal Treasury). The governor alleged that if the ship lagged behind at the port, two other vessels would be favored by setting sail first, which would cause losses to Captain Mendonça. Thus, the governor’s words demonstrate that the procurement of cabeças for slave ships depended on supplies from the interior, which were consigned to the merchants established in different posts. as it had not completed the quota of cabeças necessary to depart, Mendonça’s ship had to wait while other vessels went ahead, cutting the line. In an attempt to get over that obstacle and favor Mendonça, the governor justified his orders on the grounds of the “affection” he owed the captain and the “great” care for “his goods”. Governor Sousa Coutinho confirms that affection and personal ties did interfere with the supply of captives and the vessels’ times of departure. It is well known that these kinds of bonds were essential for the operation of slave trading networks in Angola.^[19] Hence, the market for adult slaves without Christian names in embarkation port cities was not based exclusively on the law of supply and demand.^[20]

Sousa Coutinho wished that captain Mendonça’s ship would set sail in that year of 1771. If it could not depart due to the “lack of cabeças,” then the captain-major of Benguela should help Mendonça. Such help, however, could not involve the abuse of “extorting more and more cabeças from the local mercantile community (da praça)”; moreover, the captain-major should be “a little more indulgent with the sailors’ slaves,” including those 300 belonging to the local traders. Unless the vessel had feitos próprios —that is, owned the goods that made up its cargo—, it could not carry more than “50 praças [captives] belonging to sailors”.^[21] By transferring his dilemma to the captain-major, the governor aimed to favor his friend Mendonça without causing harm to the sailors and the other merchants from Benguela.

Coutinho’s dilemma reveals that there were different ways to procure captives in the port cities, even going as far as resorting to extortions or competing over cabeças at the local market. Nevertheless, the sailors’ quota had to be respected. The source does not specify the crew size; nevertheless, the cabeças that arrived in coastal cities were unequally divided between the different parties of the transaction, which ranged from sailors to major traders. The foregoing situation indicates that amassing cabeças in Luanda depended partly on the capability of capturing the supply of captives coming from the interior. Even the sailors’ and the other slave merchants’ quota depended on these factors.

Because captains, crewmembers and other merchants received and embarked their captives in the port of Luanda, The priests of the Parish of Remédios, who charged emoluments for the cabeças they baptized^[22], identified 1,071 different slave owners, comprising the captains, crewmembers and other merchants who transported captives from Luanda. Their unequal market access opportunities are manifest in the baptismal records, which detail ceremonies with at least one cabeça, and up to 519 “cabeças and seven crias”.^[23]

Significance of the cabeças

To understand the significance of the magnitude of cabeças baptized in Luanda, it is necessary to compare it with that city’s population and with the volume of captives exported and disembarked in the Americas. In Table 1, note that the number of slaves exported from Luanda was higher than that of its residents, either free or enslaved, between 1798 and 1804. Thus, exportable captives formed the bulk of the population of Luanda. They were, however, a fluctuating contingent. The city was mainly a place of forced passage and the magnitude of the flux itself indicates that many social groups dealt with slave trade. Indeed, feeding the cabeças, accommodating them in the quintais while they waited for embankment, conducting them to the ships, etc., involved a series of social agents. The large part of the population that could be bought and sold was overwhelmingly present in the city. In 1798, for instance, the sum of all baptized cabeças alone (not the total of exported captives) corresponded to 87.8% of the total population of Luanda, almost doubling the size of the city’s free population. It also exceeded the resident slave contingent. Except for 1804, a year in which baptisms only took place between January and June, the cabeças exceeded the free and slave populations, considered separately (Table 1). For city dwellers, it was almost inescapable to be somehow tied to slave trade.

Indeed, cabeças accounted for a significant proportion of the captives exported from Luanda and disembarked in Rio. Between the years 1798 and 1803, they represented from 66.8% to 89.7% of all captives exported from Luanda. During those years, at least 70% of the cabeças baptized in Luanda disembarked in Rio de Janeiro, at times surpassing the number of Africans disembarked in the largest slaving port of the Americas at the end of the 18th century (Table 1). The number of cabeças baptized in Luanda could be smaller than that of enslaved Africans arriving in Rio, since the latter city receive captives coming from other places besides the African port city. On the other hand, the cabeças were also shipped to other American ports during the years when the number of enslaved Africans exceeded the number of arrivals in Rio.

In short, due to its magnitude, the baptisms of cabeças are trustworthy indicators of the market share of the various traders from Luanda, since, in this city, baptism was mostly oriented to human trafficking purposes, rather than the salvation of children’s souls, judging by the number of each sort of baptism.

The unequal trade of cabeças: operation and market share

Most cabeças were baptized in small ceremonies involving few captives. The slight majority of the 3,888 baptism records referred to ceremonies involving only one cabeça. There were 1,156 (31.3%) ceremonies in which only one cabeça was baptized, but if summed up, these ceremonies account for only 2.2% of all baptized captives. In fact, the 2,527 (57.4%) records of ceremonies involving up to 10 cabeças constitute the bulk of the baptismal records. However, they do not even account for 10% of all baptized captives (Table 2). The fact that only a small number of cabeças were baptized per ceremony is consistent with the nature of the operation, as many traders sold just a few slaves at once. Even major traders occasionally sold single captives or small groups of captives. A single trader never boarded all of its property on the same boat, in order to reduce the risk of losses (Silva, 2010). Thus, large-scale merchants also stocked their ships with small groups of slaves but, unlike occasional traders, they did so regularly.

Therefore, the baptism of the 519 cabeças and seven crias belonging to colonel Anselmo da Fonseca Coutinho was an exception that proves the tendency towards the monopolization of a few transactions and the concomitant supply of a few cabeças in most deals. Added up, the ceremonies for more than 20 cabeças, which represented only 20.1% of all baptismal records, encompassed 74.3% of the cabeças. The large collective ceremonies, involving from 51 to 100 cabeças, accounted for 23.7% of all the souls blessed at the Parish of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Table 2).

Table 2 – Cabeças and crias per baptism (Parish of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, 1798-1804)

Cabeças and/or Crias per baptism	Baptisms		Total of Captives
#	#	%	#	%
1	1,156	31.3	1,156	2.2
2	452	12.2	904	1.7
3	242	6.6	726	1.4
4	156	4.2	624	1.2
5	113	3.1	565	1.1
Subtotal from 1 to 5	2,119	57.4	3,975	7.5
From 6 to 10	408	11.0	3,176	6.0
From 11 to 20	427	11.6	6,407	12.2
From 21 to 50	497	13.5	16,004	30.4
From 51 to 100	178	4.8	12,482	23.7
From 101 to 200	54	1.5	7,460	14.2
Over 200	10	0.3	3,183	6.0
Total	3,693		52,687	100.0

Source: AA-LBFNSR, 1797-1799, 1800-1802, 1802-1804.
The cases which were not clearly legible have been excluded.

Baptisms, in short, could be classified in terms of the number of slaves baptized per ceremony: collective ceremonies were extremely concentrated at the top but, at the bottom, the small ceremonies involving a few captives prevailed. These distinct, albeit customary, ways of baptizing cabeças reveal that the city was part of an Atlantic trafficking society^[24], highly committed to buying and selling people, since everyone was involved in the trade: occasional small-scale merchants or large-scale traders; men orwomen; military officers and priests; civilians, soldiers, and sailors; freed, white, black, or mixed-race (pardos) people; single or married men; widows and donas.^[25] There was no occupational, color or gender barrier that would pose an insurmountable obstacle to becoming part of the business: being a free or freed person, or even a captive residing in the city, was enough. The trade, however, was monopolized by the elite and top merchants.

The elite and the top: the owners of the cabeças

Antônio José da Silva Lisboa was a top-ranking merchant, as he sold almost five thousand cabeças. Occasional sellers (who baptized up to 10 cabeças) were at the bottom of the pyramid, followed by small-scale sellers (who baptized between 11 and 50 cabeças), medium-scale sellers (between 51 and 300 cabeças), large-scale sellers (between 301 and 700 cabeças), elite sellers (between 70 and 1,000 cabeças), and top sellers (more than 1,000 cabeças) (Table 3). Mirroring the business hierarchy, the number of cabeças in Silva Lisboa’s baptismal records was way above the average trader. Thus, in spite of the wide social reach of trafficking, the market was concentrated in the hands of a few men. In one sense, the captive trading elite, which was composed of only five people/families (0.5%), accounted for more sold cabeças (4,034) than those of the 767 occasional sellers (2,002 cabeças) or the 170 small-scale sellers (4,006 cabeças), if considered separately. In another sense, the further removed from the top, the more widespread the business became. At the foundation of the pyramid, one could find the 364 sellers who baptized just one cabeça each. They represented 34% of all sellers, but, as a group, sold only 0.7% of the captives (Table 3).

Together, all 767 occasional sellers and 170 of the small-scale ones (with up to 20 cabeças) represented 87.5% of the total sellers, but only controlled 26.2% of the market. Many were opportunists, especially those who held up to 10 captives, because in this group only 21% had baptized more than one captive. It is possible that not all of the cabeças belonging to owners of this category were destined for the Atlantic trade, but for the perpetuation of slavery in the city of Luanda itself. In fact, the occasional sellers were behind the small ones. The average number of slaves sold was substantially higher among small-scale sellers, and so was the frequency of their transactions, as 62.4% of them baptized cabeças more than once. As for the occasional merchants, the overwhelming majority of them (79%) only performed one baptismal act.

In short, the city’s slave business hierarchy was not a mere top-bottom division; it was multi-layered. For this reason, the proportion of sellers who performed more than one baptism tended to increase, starting from the group of small-scale sellers and reaching 100% among those who sold more than 200 cabeças. Although the baptismal records we have investigated cover a period of slightly more than six years, we could affirm that certain owners of cabeças were large-scale sellers whose presence was frequent on the Luanda market, as will be detailed below.

The group formed by the top and elite merchants was composed of only 11 people (0.1% of all captive owners) who, together, amassed no less than 23,237 (44.1% of the total) baptized cabeças during little more than six years. This is equivalent to almost three times the entire population of Luanda in 1798 or a little more than half of the urban population of Rio de Janeiro in 1799. Besides the aforementioned Coutinho (Silva, 2010; Pantoja, 2014), who were they? How did they operate?

Except for the surgeon-major Manoel da Cruz, the top and elite traders were men who held military ranks. The vessel captains were different from Angolan military personnel in that the latter were significantly more integrated into the social, economic and political life of the city and the presídios of the interior. Their business activities probably extended to the northern ports of Benguela, (Cabinda, Ambriz, etc.) High military posts, such as colonel and sergeant-major, stand out in the sources, but captains and lieutenants, like Ricardo da Silva Rego, were also from families whose members occupied (high) military positions in Luanda and/or in the presídios. As shown by historiography (Couto, 1972; Santos, 2005; Carvalho, 2014, 2020) and the aforementioned words of Governor Sousa Coutinho, military officers in general, and captain-majors in particular, were central to the process of producing captives. They used their positions to operate on the Angolan market of cabeças.

It is not possible to analyze the trajectory of every elite and top trader in this chapter, but we can obtain some insights by considering and comparing some examples of high-ranking merchants.

Captain Antônio José da Silva Lisboa had 4,871 cabeças baptized in 112 ceremonies, an average of 43.5 cabeças per baptism. His captives were sold in a period of about six years and two months, between March 26, 1798, and June 3, 1804. Silva Lisboa’s enormous array of captives represents 9% of the total number of baptized cabeças. The sum of the slaves he sent to the Americas in 1798-1804 surpassed the population of free and enslaved people in Luanda (considered separately) in each year of that period. Had Silva Lisboa continued exporting captives at this pace, it would have been equivalent to selling almost all permanent inhabitants of Luanda every six years.

Silva Lisboa’s prominence does not stand out only considering the population of Luanda: the 4,871 cabeças sold by this sole trader correspond to 48% of the captives disembarked in Rio de Janeiro in 1800 (Table 1), 32.5% of the enslaved population of that city’s urban parishes in 1799, or 55.3% of all its freed contingent.^[26] Thus, the profile of captain Silva Lisboa symbolizes the extreme concentration of the cabeça market in Luanda. To a greater or lesser extent, it is representative of the group of top and elite traders.

Silva Lisboa paid frequent visits to the port of Benguela, and probably the port of Luanda as well, since at least 1787. In 1790 he was promoted to captain of one of the Companhias de Ordenança at the Kwanza River, a very important outlet for the captives coming from the presídios of Muxima, Massangano, Ambaca, among others, to the city of Luanda. In 1791, Silva Lisboa was mentioned as captain and master of two corvettes that carried natural history maps, made by Joaquim José da Silva, and correspondence from the governor of Angola to the Secretary of State for the Navy and Overseas (Secretário de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar) in Lisbon. The vessel would stop over in Pernambuco^[27], certainly carrying cabeças that Silva Lisboa had baptized in Luanda, where he died around 1815, by then a colonel.^[28]

In view of the foregoing, captain Silva Lisboa was connected to the interior of the African continent through the Kwanza River and rendered services to the governor of Angola and the central power in Lisbon, similarly to colonel Anselmo da Fonseca Coutinho (Silva, 2010) and other families whose members held military posts in Luanda, Benguela and the presídios, such as the Pereira Bravo (Ferreira, 2012, pp. 92-94). The difference between Silva Lisboa and Fonseca Coutinho seems to be that the latter was a filho da terra (literally a “son of the land,” a locally born man) from a family whose ancestors probably had been in Angola at least since the early eighteenth century. This may have been the reason why he was much more connected to internal trade networks linked to the sobados, with whom many of Luanda’s great slave merchants had kinship ties (Silva, 2010; Pantoja, 2010a; Orioli, 2013, pp. 13-62).

Anselmo Coutinho, in turn, resembled Ricardo da Silva Rego, the fourth merchant in terms of number of slaves (Table 4). The Silva Rego family had long been trading in slaves based on a kinship network —although for not as long as the Fonseca Coutinho family—, occupying mainly the posts of second-lieutenant (alferes), captain, and colonel of the Terço de Auxiliares of Luanda, between 1779 and 1796. In 1770, José da Silva Rego sold goods to a vessel belonging to the royal treasury, and João da Silva Rego was acknowledged, in 1782, as a “trader in the city of Luanda” (negociante da praça de Luanda). A nephew of Paulo da Silva Rego was appointed to the position of ajudante (auxiliary) at the presidio of Pedras do Encoge in 1794. On the other hand, there is no one named Silva Rego on the list of vessel captains available in the TSDT database.^[29] The basis of the family business apparently revolved around the flow of captives from the interior to the city of Luanda, without taking part of the Atlantic crossing.

Quite different is the case of Paulino Pinto da Mota, who occupies the tenth position among the traders in Table 4. He was an experienced ship captain who traveled between the ports of Central Atlantic Africa and Southeastern Brazil. In 1793, he was the captain of the corvette Cabo Frio, which left the port of Santos, in the captaincy of São Paulo, afterwards returning to the same city with a stopover in Rio de Janeiro.^[30] It is improbable that he owned either the corvette or its “effects”^[31], as it was commonly said at that time, since, in 1797, he captained the ship Ana de Lisboa, but did not own the vessel. The “hull and effects” (casco e efeitos) worth 49:051$610 belonged to the Lisbon dealer Manoel Joseph de Sousa Freire & Co. The Ana de Lisboa left the Portuguese capital around August 1797 to buy captives in “Cabinda, Molembo, Loango and other ports north of this coast”. The ship, however, could not reach the northern coast and arrived, damaged, in Luanda, on October 30 of the same year. In 1799, the owner of the Ana de Lisboa still requested the governor of Angola, in Luanda, to grant an exemption from paying royal duties on Indian trade goods, because he had already paid them in Lisbon.^[32] The baptismal records from the parish of Remédios show that captain Paulino Pinto da Mota baptized 737 cabeças between March 26 and November 3, 1798, certainly acting only as captain, not as owner. He transported slaves whose owners were established in the ports of Lisbon, Santos and Rio de Janeiro. He was undoubtedly associated with them in order to receive his share in cabeças.

In turn, the Portuguese Manoel da Cruz, who occupies the fifth place in Table 4, must have made a fortune with the slave trade in Luanda. On February 9, 1784, he was in Salvaterra dos Magos; two days later, he was appointed to the post of surgeon of the kingdom of Angola. He requested an exemption from fees for letters issued by the chancellery, claiming that he had “limited means”. In April 1784, Cruz arrived in Luanda^[33], where he had 2,103 captives baptized between 1798 and 1800. He seemingly based his fortune on trading captives in Angola, especially in Luanda. If Cruz started trafficking upon his arrival in town in 1784, his commercial activities lasted 16 years. It took a long time for him to become one of the main traders in terms of the number of cabeças registered at the parish of Remédios, in the late 18th century. But he was not the kind of merchant connected to interior networks through kinship; instead, he relied on intermediaries called aviados^[34], who were sent to the presídios to send him captives. His main commercial base was the city of Luanda (Corrêa, 2019, p. 216-220). Among the top traders, he held smallest number of baptism ceremonies with more than 20 captives. Unlike him, the filhos da terra, who spoke Portuguese and Kimbundu, generally occupied the military posts necessary for trading in the inland presídios and dealt with slave-supplying sobados.^[35] This was not the case of Cruz, who was married to a Portuguese woman, the widow of a servant of the Baron of Moçâmedes.^[36] Although he had no military rank, his position of surgeon-major linked him to the military, as his mission was to treat the “military body” of Angola.^[37] Probably, the position helped to create mercantile networks with military participation.

When he asked permission to return to Lisbon in 1795, Cruz claimed that he was sick and that he had served in Angola for more than ten years. His request was granted by the Conselho Ultramarino (Overseas Council) on May 23, 1796.^[38] Cruz’s imminent departure to Portugal seems to have led him to invest the resources he had accumulated during his life in Luanda thanks to the slave trade. It is not certain whether he left town before the baptisms of his cabeças, leaving a proxy in his place.

What we do know is that even within Luanda’s elite and top traders there were different types of merchants, with diverse access to captives and engaged in distinct personal and mercantile networks. Thus, even though it is debatable whether the trading groups in Luanda and Benguela were dependent on Brazilian or Portuguese mercantile capital, it is certain thar Luanda’s trafficking society was capable of sustaining itself based on its interests.

Leaving the city of Rio de Janeiro: from one to 240 escravos novos^[39]

As in Luanda, the business of redistributing the newly arrived African slaves in Rio de Janeiro was both concentrated and widespread. Multitudes of traders participated actively in the trade. Between 1809 and 1833, for example, 1,313 people were involved in the trafficking of escravos novos along the route that linked the city of Rio de Janeiro and the captaincy/province of São Paulo alone. They drove 25,719 escravos novos in 2,103 shipments. In the same period, along the route that linked the capital city to other locations in the captaincy/province of Rio de Janeiro itself, 2,963 merchants sent 6,050 shipments that drove 59,162 escravos novos. For Minas Gerais, we have located 4,144 merchants, responsible for 8,354 shipments involving 67,471 escravos novos (Fragoso, Guedes, 2001a, p. 30; Bôscaro, 2021, pp. 72, 81). The numbers of merchants, shipments and escravos novos per province are proportional. As the 19th-century Minas Gerais was the largest slaveholding captaincy/province in Brazil (Martins, 2018), many more people participated in that regional branch of the internal slave trade. As the distribution of captives intensified, more people became involved in the business. As in Luanda, occasional merchants, Atlantic traders, donas, priests, captains, among other groups/families, were part of the social consensus around the trade of human beings. Within their possibilities, people from different municipalities participated in the distribution of the 167,539 escravos novos registered by the Polícia da Corte (Court Police) in Rio de Janeiro between 1809 and 1830 (Table 5). The shipments brought from one to 240 escravos novos — the latter being the number of slaves sent by Veríssimo José Coelho & Co. to Campos, after buying them, in 1830, from José Luís Teixeira, Francisco dos Santos Ferreira, Joaquim Antônio Ferreira and Domingos Carvalho de Sá.^[40]

The significance of the escravos novos in the trafficking Rio

However, the language of the business was ever-changing, and the so-called escravos novos only started being so when their presence became more frequent than that of other kinds of enslaved persons from 1821 on. Thus, we have chosen to emphasize the period 1825-1830, since the documents dealing with the African slaves disembarked in the city of Rio became more standardized only after 1824. After the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in Brazil, in 1831, the escravos novos gave way to the ladinos (African slaves already familiar with the Portuguese language), who ranged between 72.9% and 97.3% of the slaves registered by the Polícia da Corte. Not surprisingly, the series of dispatches ended in 1833, perhaps so that the police would not have to document the clandestine trade. But even so, the dispatches show the social acceptance of slave trade, which was in fact embraced by the entire society, as well as the State (Mamigonian, 2017). The nascent Brazilian Navy, financed by large-scale merchants, aimed to protect the Atlantic trade of captives in the recently founded Empire of Brazil (Oliveira, 2017).

Hence, the number of escravos novos sent from Rio de Janeiro was significant when compared to the city’s population. Between 1824 and 1830 alone, the 127,400 slaves dispatched from Rio were equivalent to almost three times the 43,376 (free, freed and enslaved) inhabitants of the city’s urban parishes in 1799. This would be tantamount to selling out the city’s entire population three times every seven years; or to twice the urban population in 1821 (which comprised 79,321 inhabitants), or even, with a large surplus, all of the parishioners in 1838.^[41] Although Rio was the main market in the South Atlantic, being the political and economic center of the Empire of Brazil, born in 1822 (Fragoso, 1992), the city was also a place of passage (Faria, 1988) for an enormous fluctuating population of escravos novos. Therefore, the escravos novos found in the dispatches registered by the police between 1825 and 1830, which represent between 46.2% and 88.7% of the Africans disembarked in the port of Rio de Janeiro (Table 5), are also a reliable sample for this analysis.

The unequal market of escravos novos: operation and distribution from Rio

Table 6 shows 121,448 escravos novos and ladinos, between 1825 and 1830, attempting to identify a pattern in the quantity of slaves per dispatch. We have noticed that small shipments of one or two slaves prevailed. But though they represented 51.6% of the dispatches, they only account for 10,766 slaves (8.9%). However, despite the predominance of occasional traders’ shipments (up to 2 captives), small shipments (3 to 5 captives) and medium shipments (6 to 10 captives), some dispatches included 11 to 50 captives, and we have labeled them as “large shipments”. Accounting for 16.4% of the dispatches, the large shipments sent 58,954 (48.5%) escravos novos. Above them, there were mass shipments with more than 50 slaves, which represented only 2.3% of all dispatches but were capable of supplying almost one-fourth (22.3%) of the regional markets.

Table 6 – Dispatches and escravos novos* leaving Rio de Janeiro (1825-1830)

Number of slaves shipped per dispatch	Dispatches	%	Total of Escravos Novos	%
1	5,470	34.8	5,470	4.5
2	2,648	16.8	5,296	4.4
3	1,315	8.4	3,945	3.2
4	971	6.2	3,884	3.2
5 to 10	2,398	15.2	16,876	13.9
11 to 25	1,726	11.0	28,301	23.3
26 to 50	853	5.4	30,644	25.2
51 to 75	233	1.5	14,111	11.6
76 to 100	85	0.5	7,367	6.1
Over 101	40	0.3	5,554	4.6
Total	15,739	13.0	121,448	100.0

Source: AN-RJ-CP, 421, 424 and 425.
* 6,594 slaves that were not escravos novos have been included, as sometimes crias and ladino slaves were also traded.
For the number of slaves per dispatch, we have used categories that are different from those used in the analysis of the baptismal records, considering that the biggest shipment of escravos novos from Rio was half the size of the Luanda baptismal record that involved 519 cabeças and seven crias.

Thus, small-sized dispatches were the most frequent ones. The hierarchy of the shipments was also multi-layered, growing from the broad base to the narrow top of the pyramid, which largely explains the participation of thousands of small merchants, some of them regular and some occasional, as in Luanda. In some cases, the small groups of captives described in the dispatch had been purchased directly by the people/families who ordered them in Rio de Janeiro for their own farms in other regions. The process, however, was directed by a reduced elite. In short, there were myriad ways to market captives.

For example, some masters resorted to their sons and/or to tropeiro^[42] slaves who trafficked on their orders or by negotiation, while others brought slaves from Rio just to supply their own estates. In 1805, in Porto Feliz, captaincy of São Paulo, captain-major Francisco Correa de Moraes Leite counted with 26 slaves in his residence, but requested there four more “of their [African] nations that he ordered from Rio de Janeiro” to supply his sugar mill.^[43] On the other hand, some traders went to Rio in order to buy slaves and resell them at their hometown. In 1803 and 1813, Francisco de Oliveira Setúbal “made a living out of his business of buying slaves in Rio de Janeiro and selling them in this town,” an expression that shows that the reproduction of slavery in the interior had the port of Rio as a reference^[44], just as the city of Luanda could foster enslavement in the presídios.

Therefore, making a living out of the business of buying and selling people in the internal market consolidated social and family bonds. The Franciscos de Oliveira Setúbal, father and son, remained in business and took at least 58 escravos novos from Rio to Porto Feliz. The Portuguese father and his São Paulo-born son were involved in an enterprise that passed from one generation to the next. Everything suggests that the father was no longer involved in the activity by 1815, when, at the age of 63, he was described as a farmer. The son, however, succeeded him in the trade he had been learning since he was at least 14 years old. At this age, and accompanied by the crioulo (a black man born in Brazil) named Adão, Leite Setúbal, the son, left for a five-day journey to Cuiabá, in the distant captaincy of Mato Grosso, a place that had been receiving slaves from Porto Feliz since the 18th century. In 1822, when he left Rio de Janeiro for São Paulo, via Itaguaí (a stop on the route), the junior Setúbal was already 26 years old. That year, accompanied by a comrade and three captives “brought by him”, he drove 19 escravos novos to São Paulo. In 1828, he drove another 39 escravos novos through the same route. In 1830, Setúbal again arrived in Rio via Itaguaí with two ladino slaves, Crispim Mina and José pardo (mixed-race man), and a comrade. His family had been active in the domestic slave trade for as long as some Luandan families.

In 1854, within that world that mingled personal and business relationships, the slaver Francisco junior, at around 60 years old, freed the slaves that had been his business comrades. In his will, he declared free the slaves “Crispim and his wife Manoela, both from the Mina nation; and Antônio, the overseer, and his wife Joaquina, both also de nação (that is, African born)”. If his terça (the third part of half the inheritance, of which the testator could dispose as he wished) did not cover the cost of the manumissions, the apportionment “[should] never weigh upon the four freed slaves, who [should] enjoy their freedoms, without any further responsibility”. Maybe his trafficking comrade José Pardo was already dead or freed when the will was written, but we know that Crispim had been transporting captives from Rio to Porto Feliz, together with his master, since at least 1822. If they bought and sold people until 1850, when the Eusébio de Queiroz Law prohibited the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, then master and slave would have been working side by side for 28 years. Crispim Mina had also spent time with Setúbal senior. The trust between the captive and the Setúbals does not derive from the fact that the slave had been born in his master’s house (which he had not, since he was a Mina slave), but from the years of coexistence that shaped the relationship between an African man, a Portuguese man, and his Brazilian son, all of them slave carriers on the Rio-São Paulo circuit. The testator’s codicil, dated 1863, shows that Crispim Mina had died before his master, but his wife Manoela was freed. The overseer Antônio was also manumitted. The bonds of affection between masters, a slave overseer, and a ladino Mina who helped in the trafficking of escravos novos were essential for the reproduction of slavery in the inland towns of Porto Feliz and Cuiabá. The consensus around the commerce of people in the trafficking society overcame distances and social boundaries.

Evidently, the family organization that distributed captives from Rio de Janeiro to different locations in the South-Southeast axis of Brazil was not specific to the Rio-São Paulo circuit. The captaincy of Minas Gerais, the largest slaveholding province in the 19th century (Martins, 2018), was the most closely linked to Rio. Such family enterprises were chains composed of different forms of commerce and kinship relations. This is exemplified by Valentim Gomes Tolentino, a prominent mixed-race caravan slave trader (traficante tropeiro pardo), moneylender, farmer and second-lieutenant (alferes); and by the powerful Antônio Dias Tostes, the largest slave owner in the Zona da Mata region of Minas Gerais at the beginning of the 19th century, who belonged to the third-generation of a family of conquerors established in the area since 1742 (Bôscaro, 2021, chapter 5). These traders and their families preserved strong commercial ties with merchants from Rio de Janeiro, quite as Pereira Bravo, Fonseca Coutinho, and Silva Rego, who connected the inland presídios and Luanda, for example.

Elite and top traders: supplying the internal market from Rio de Janeiro

Who were the major traders of escravos novos,directly or indirectly controlling the physical reproduction of slavery in different regions supplied by Rio?

Based on the 19,461 escravos novos sold between 1825 and 1830, where the seller’s name has been mentioned explicitly^[45], Table 7 shows that the 545 merchants had a quite unequal participation in the market. The 348 small-scale traders (63.9%), those who sold between one to ten captives, only account for 1,054 captives (5.4%). Among them, 287 (82.4%) made just one sale in six years. Of the 138 merchants who sold up to three captives, only 22 (15.6%) made more than one transaction. In short, despite the differences among small-scale merchants, most of them traded in only one regional market (area).

This feature changed as the number of slaves sold increased. In the range from 51 to 300 slaves, the number of large-scale merchants decreased to 62 people, 11.4% of all traders, but they were responsible for the sale of 7,281 (37.4%) slaves. Among them, there were regional merchants such as Oliveira Setúbal from Porto Feliz and Dias Tostes from Zona da Mata in Minas Gerais, but also traders established in Rio de Janeiro. Large-scale merchants made more than one sale during that six-year period more frequently than medium-scale ones: 57 out of 62 large traders (92%) did so. Similarly, they tended to have links to different regional markets, as 48 (74.2%) of them did (Table 7).

However, excluding collective sales, the traders in the last two ranges (elite and top sellers) were the real owners of the regional captive distribution business. This group was composed of only 13 sellers who sold 6,271 slaves. All of them made more than one shipment of captives and operated in different regions. Having sold about one-third of the population under study, they certainly shipped fewer slaves (around 1,000) than the large-scale sellers. However, they represented only 13 (2.4%) of all traders (Table 7).

Once again, the evidence suggests that the market was extremely concentrated, a feature that definitely stands out when we add up the last three ranges (large-scale, elite and top traders), which, together, made up only 13.8% of all sellers, but were responsible for the sale of almost 70% of the escravos novos. It was definitely a pre-industrial market, just like the market of cabeças in Luanda. At the bottom there were a multitude of occasional small-scale traders and, at the summit, a more stable group that controlled the flows of the internal slave trade (Table 7). In fact, the regional distribution of captives, as a business, does not differ much from other business activities in Rio de Janeiro at the time, such as cabotage and cattle transportation, and even the Atlantic slave trade. All these segments had the same characteristics: the numerical predominance of occasional sellers in a business controlled by a very reduced group (Fragoso, 1998).

We will now take a closer look at the major traders, comparing them to others when convenient. Table 8 shows the names of the elite and top sellers, considered individually and collectively. Analyzing the individual sales, we notice that the large-scale merchants were among the top five, collectively selling 3,528 captives (18% of Table 7). They are the so-called negociantes de grosso trato, who were involved, at the same time, in large enterprises and different types of business, including the Atlantic crossing of captives (Fragoso 1998; Florentino 1995).

Among the 13 elite and top traders, there were people like João Alvares da Silva Porto, a merchant involved in different businesses, including the Atlantic slave trade. Silva Porto’s importance can be grasped from the analysis of his 1832 bankruptcy filing. In that year, he owed 85 people the enormous sum of 1:611:572$279, whereas 221 merchants owed him the equivalent to 1:618:365$315. These numbers make him one of the members of the reduced economic elite that controlled the main businesses in Rio de Janeiro: credit, slave trade, etc. (Fragoso, 1998, p. 276).

However, in Table 8, other people connected to the international trade of enslaved Africans can be found next to Silva Porto, such as Joaquim Antônio Ferreira and Antônio José Moreira Pinto (Florentino, 1997, pp. 254-256). The presence and the importance of these gentlemen in the distribution of captives to various localities suggest the hypothesis that Rio de Janeiro’s large-scale traders (negociantes de grosso trato), who controlled the international Atlantic slave shipping, also dominated large shares of Brazil’s internal slave trade, redistributing captives from the city of Rio de Janeiro. This reveals the direct influence of these major dealers in the reproduction of slave society in different regions of the South-Southeast and, consequently, their ‘dependence’ on the Rio merchant community, at least regarding the supply of captives.

It was common for farmers to take out loans in the form of slaves (not money). Such “credit-in-slaves” agreements linked traders established in Rio to the distant town of Porto Feliz, a food and sugar-producing municipality (Guedes, 2008, chapter 1), which means that the financing for agricultural activities came largely from loans from slave traders. As early as 1799, one year after the creation of the municipality, the procurator of the Senado da Câmara (municipal council) stated that Porto Feliz was a newborn town in which the “principal” residents were “establishing themselves after the beginning of the sugar trade”. All or almost all of them became “heavily burdened” with debts “to raise their sugar factories” (engenhos). However, they could not pay their debts “in time” and were “forced to sell sugar in advance,” which caused them “great losses”. This state of affairs threatened production, especially because “the value of slaves has reached such a highly excessive price that it has become a proverb among us: the sugar mill men work only to pay for slaves (…)”.^[46] In fact, between 1803 and 1829, the captives of African origin went from representing 42.6% to 72.8% of the town’s slave population, or rather, increased from 781 to 2,745 people and reached 84% of the adult slave population (over 14 years old) (Guedes, 2008, pp. 135, 138). The reproduction of local slave labor depended on the slave trade. Therefore, the town, especially the booming sugar sector, was heavily dependent on the port of Rio de Janeiro.

In fact, setting up a sugar mill required enough capital to put up sugar factories and acquire tools, slaves, etc. For the annual operation, the proprietors had to take out loans, since the agrarian nature of the economy at the time created a mismatch between the annual agricultural cycle and the daily needs of inputs and food. Due to this mismatch, the merchant advanced the producer the necessary goods, mainly slaves, in exchange for his future harvest (Sampaio, 2002, pp. 30-31, 45). Therefore, the words of the procurator of Porto Feliz, a municipality that is representative of the colonial/imperial sugar economy, highlight the inexorable dependency on mercantile credit provided by slave traders (Sampaio, 2002, pp. 29-47; Fragoso, 1992).

The procurator’s words coincide with those of the traveler Saint-Hilaire about the difficult access to credit by those who were setting up sugar mills: “the new settlers of Porto Feliz were undoubtedly too poor to afford having many slaves” (Saint-Hilaire, 1976, pp. 181-182). The debts of the sugar mill proprietors and/or sugarcane producers could reach large proportions throughout the first half of the 19th century, ranging from 35% to 84% of their assets. Many debts came from the purchase of slaves, since these represented, on average, 44.2% of the assets of 38 sugarcane plantation owners whose estate was inventoried after their death, while the real estate —including town houses, mills (with all their utensils), other buildings, and the land itself— accounted for 32.8% (Guedes, 2008, chapter I).

The shipments of escravos novos sent from the city of Rio de Janeiro to the town or other locations indicate the centrality of the credit system in the mercantile networks. For example, in 1836, the assets of the deceased Jesuíno José da Rocha, a “mixed-race sugar mill proprietor from Porto Feliz,” were valued at 7:997$008, and his debts totaled 1:862$734 (23.3%). The debts basically comprised slaves which the widow had to hand over to creditors. The largest creditor was Antônio Joaquim Lemos Gomes, from Rio de Janeiro, whose credit of 1:520$000 (81,6% of the total debt) was obtained in 1827 and had to be paid within three years, in equal instalments. Lemos Gomes was likely the slave trader established at the Court of Rio de Janeiro who bought slaves in Africa between 1801 and 1830 (Florentino, 1995, pp. 281-282). Lemos Gomes does not figure among the 13 largest sellers in Table 8, but he sold 161 escravos novos in ten operations between 1826 and 1830. Out of those slaves, 51 were sent to São Paulo in seven shipments. He also sold 80 escravos novos in a single operation for the coffee town of Valença, in the province of Rio de Janeiro. He even reached the interior of Goiás, where he sold 30 captives. This Portuguese from Braga, who lived in Rio, was already making trips to São Paulo by 1811, passing through Santos. Therefore, he had been trading slaves for almost two decades.^[47] A small part of Rocha’s debt to Gomes was paid in sugar, but six out of the deceased’s 17 slaves were drawn from his assets to pay off the creditor.

Another example of such dependency is the case of the merchant Antônio Tertuliano dos Santos, who was not among the 13 largest traders in Table 8. Fragments of his mercantile trajectory reveal that the “credit in slaves” system and personal relationships were at the core of his business of redistributing slaves from the city of Rio to inland markets. In 1828, the mixed-race second-lieutenant Joaquim Barbosa Neves, a trader and sugarcane producer from Porto Feliz, owed “money he had in his possession” to Antônio Tertuliano dos Santos, also a second-lieutenant. The money referred to the settlement “of accounts [resulting from the purchase] of ten slaves” received on credit. Alone, Tertuliano shipped 192 escravos novos through Rio de Janeiro between 1828 and 1830, 139 (72.4%) of which were sent to São Paulo, his preferred market. By the end of the 1820s, Neves bought about 5% of the slaves sold by Tertuliano. In other words, at least one-fifth of his 41 slaves were purchased by one single merchant from Rio de Janeiro. When Joaquim Neves passed away, slaves represented 58.5% of his assets, but he had debts for 5:202$300 (25% of his assets), 86.9% of which came from the purchase of slaves. Just like Neves, other sugar producers from Porto Feliz were indebted to Tertuliano. Manoel Martins Bonilha, for instance, sold his 1834-1835 sugar production to that merchant.^[48]

In the mid-19th century, Tertuliano still traded captives and was a creditor in Paraibuna, Rio Claro (Graham, 2005, pp. 33, 101-102) and Iguape (Valentim, 2006, pp. 35-36, 255), the last two located in São Paulo. Whether as a seller, guarantor, or dispatcher of escravos novos, dealing alone or in partnership, he is listed in the dispatches as “a trader of the local mercantile community” (negociante desta praça) of Rio de Janeiro, and he intervened in 221 sale operations involving 1,924 slaves between 1822 and 1833.^[49] Tertuliano was born in the province of São Paulo^[50]. This turned out to be his preferred market as well, since 166 (75%) of the collective deals in which he took part were directed to that province, sending 1,588 (82.5% of the total) escravos novos. Considering that in the West of São Paulo (Bacellar, 1997) kinship was fundamental to economic operations, the case of Tertuliano is similar to those of the Luanda merchants who had family ties to the residents of the inland presídios.

Moreover, as we have seen before, Francisco de Oliveira Setúbal junior used to go “to the Mines of Cuiabá [on] business,” and the town of Porto Feliz was a point in the internal slave trade route to such mines. That is why the export map of 1814 mentions that Manoel de Souza took 12 slaves bought in Rio de Janeiro to Cuiabá.^[51] Thus, the captives that left Rio arrived at different backlands of Portuguese America and, later, the Empire of Brazil. These markets depended largely on the supply of slaves and credit (in the form of slaves) provided by traders established in Rio. Antônio Tertuliano dos Santos and Antônio Joaquim Lemos Gomes are examples of merchants linked to the towns in the interior of São Paulo and to other localities via the regional slave trade. This commerce not only hierarchized traders, but also made the producers dependent on such traders.

However, these merchants had different profiles. Lemos Gomes was an Atlantic businessman and probably did not have as many links to the trade networks of the interior of São Paulo as Tertuliano, of whom no connection with the Atlantic crossing is known. Tertuliano, who was a Paulista, operated mainly in his province’s market, even though he had settled in Rio. The same has been noticed regarding José Francisco de Mesquita, future Marquis of Bonfim, the second largest individual trader in Table 8. According to his will^[52], he was from Congonhas do Campo, Minas Gerais, and, according to Lenharo, during the 1820s, he had been responsible for taking large cattle herds from Minas Gerais to supply Rio de Janeiro (Lenharo, 1979, p. 62). His sales of slaves were also directed mainly to his province of origin.

On May 18, 1818, “the captain José Francisco de Mesquita, from Minas, resident in this Court [Rio de Janeiro], aged 26, left for Minas via Paraibuna with two comrades, one of them a slave, which he brought with him”. ^[53]Between 1817 and 1832, he operated in the internal slave trade as a dispatcher, guarantor and seller, and he was involved in 97 deals, resulting in the sale of 1,162 escravos novos. Minas Gerais was the final destination of 1,128 of these slaves, negotiated in 92 deals. The Mineiro José Francisco de Mesquita belonged to the select group of families that managed be part of the business elite of Rio de Janeiro and its surroundings throughout the entire 19th century. His cousin, the sergeant-major and knight of the Order of Christ, Francisco Pereira Mesquita, had been one of the most important large-scale traders (negociante de grosso trato) of the beginning of the century and the only heir to José Pereira Guimarães, one of 36 merchants listed by the Viceroy of Brazil, Count of Resende, in the late 18th century. Following the transformations in the Brazilian economy, José Mesquita and his family diversified their business. At the beginning of the century, belonging to the economic elite meant being involved in the slave trade and in usury, having investments in urban real estate and owning transatlantic businesses. When Francisco Mesquita died in 1821, then-captain José Francisco de Mesquita and his relatives had a business with branches in Lisbon, Porto and other cities. Therefore, the family definitely belonged to the business elite of Rio de Janeiro (Fragoso, 1998; 2001). Decades later, in the 1870s, already bearing the title of Count of Bonfim, José Francisco de Mesquita was the director of the Caixa Econômica e Monte Socorro do Rio de Janeiro, one of the Court’s main financial institutions. As we know, one of the objectives of Caixa Econômica was to take “families out of the clutches of usury”. It is certainly ironic that part of the Mesquitas’ fortune was made at the expense of usury and the slave trade (Fragoso, 2001).

Mesquita, however, is quite different from João do Nascimento Natal, who occupies the eighth position among the individual traders in Table 8. He was responsible for several shipments of slaves, totaling more than 300 escravos novos in the second half of the 1820s, and was described, in a passport dated August 6, 1821, as a “28-year-old gypsy man, of ordinary height, with a round face, a full beard, who left for Campos with his brother José Soares, gypsy, dark-skinned, 30 years old, of ordinary height, with a long face, big eyes and not much of a beard”.^[54] Thus, the gypsy Natal had been active in the internal trade for at least nine years. Around the 1820s, the French traveler Jean Debret stated that the “gypsy caste” prioritized “their exclusive trade of escravos novos and civilized slaves [ladinos]” (Debret, 1989, p. 107).

Debret realized that gypsies also participated in the internal trade of captives, but alongside marquises, mixed-race individuals, regional elites, etc. Natal, however, greatly expanded his trafficking capital by being recognized as guarantor and dispatcher, and by taking part in collective sales, thus going from 344 to 1,033 escravos novos, sold mostly to Minas Gerais. The internal slave trade derived its strength from the shared, intense and lasting participation of marquises, barons, knights of Christ, Christians, gypsies, men, women (almost absent in baptismal records and in dispatches as slave traders), free people, freedmen, and even slaves, as well as sobas from the other side of the Atlantic, among others. The construction of the global trafficking society was a collective work.

By way of conclusion

Diverse corpora of historical documents —baptismal records from Luanda and dispatches from Rio de Janeiro— have revealed many similarities between their respective regional slave markets. The wide participation of thousands of small-scale and occasional traders coexisted with the concentration of the enormous business in a few hands, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Luanda, a few families with kinship ties to the inland presídios, such as the Fonseca Coutinho, the Silva Rego and the Pereira Bravo, were interwoven in a mercantile network. These families had much in common with José Mesquita and Tertuliano dos Santos, who, operating from Rio, developed their businesses mainly in their native regions, where they had family ties. To a greater or lesser degree, the elites and the top traders in each city exercised political power or were strongly tied to it. Therefore, the trade of souls revolved around the organization of power (Miller, 1988; Florentino, 1997). Likewise, everything indicates that those who controlled the flows between the interior and the port cities, on both sides of the Atlantic, did so through a credit system and solid personalized mercantile networks. In Angola, merchants established in the coastal towns of Luanda and Benguela depended on the influx of captives from the inland presídios; therefore, trying to gain control over the captive supplying networks was essential. Similarly, the inland towns of Brazil depended on the supply and credit provided by traders established in Rio.

On the other hand, in Luanda, vessel captains may have worked more often for others than for themselves, just as, in Brazil, some traders left their inland towns to resell slaves in their parishes, although not always negotiating by their own means. Perhaps, neither of them was the main owner of the business. However, far below them, a multitude of sailors, tropeiros, freedmen with scant possessions and even ladino slaves also legitimized, from the bottom up, the global trafficking society based on the exploitation of cabeças and escravos novos.

Primary sources

(AA) Arquivo da Arquidiocese de Luanda, Livros de Batismos da Freguesia de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, (LBFNSR) (1797-1799; 1800-1802; 1802-1804).

(AA) Livro de Batismos da Freguesia de Nossa Senhora da Conceição (1760-1786).

(AN-RJ-CP) Arquivo Nacional, Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Coleção Polícia da Corte. Códices 390, 411, 421, 424 e 425.

(AHA) Arquivo Histórico de Angola, Códice 80, c. de fl. 12 e fl. 42.

(AHU) Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Avulsos de Angola, Cx. 66, doc. 92

(ANTT) Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Microfilme 132.

(AHA-IHGB) Padab, Códice 87-A-19-1, 126, 00233; Códice 271-C-14-4, 00211.

(AESP-LNPF) Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Lista Nominativa de Porto Feliz,1805, fogo (f.) 1.

(AESP), Ordenanças de Itu, Cx. 55, Pasta 2, Ordem 292.

(MRCI). Inventário post-mortem de Ana Joaquina de Almeida. Pasta 243, doc. 5.

(AN-RJ), Verba testamentária, Livro 18, no 151.

References

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