Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade

"This is a very influential book, stressing the Atlantic connections between Angola and Brazil during the 18th and 19th centuries. When we think about the period of the transatlantic slave trade, we tend to focus on African chiefs and merchants and important players such as Njinga. Ferreira shows, however, that there were lots of intermediaries in this process, including smaller traders, soldiers and priests who played key roles in the consolidation and organization of the slave trade. Ferreira rescues regular people from anonymity, stressing the historical agency of captains, priests and colonial officers, but also enslaved individuals, who are moving back and forth between Brazil and Angola. He delves into important collections of documents in Angolan archives and reconstructs a richer history of this region, examining mechanisms of enslavement and cosmologies. Ferreira taps into collections that were not accessible to foreign scholars until the early 21st century. Earlier generations of scholars didn’t have access to Angolan libraries and archives during the four decades of internal conflict, which included the anticolonial and the civil war that devasted Angola from 1961 to 2002. Ferreira wrote a rich social history of Angola, examining the expansion of warfare in the 18th century, the use of court cases against enslavement, and the effects of the slave trade in Angola. His focus was on common people, peasants, soldiers, and enslaved individuals, and how they understood these two centuries of turmoil. Ferreira skilfully demonstrates that it is possible to write microhistories of Africans before the 20th century."