Paper short abstract:

The arrival of the Europeans to the West African coast during the fifteenth century created new opportunities for commerce, cooperation and conflict. With no known local written sources, how can we reassess the primordial African agency in these dynamics using contemporary European literary sources?

Paper long abstract:

During the first phase expansion along the west African coast, the Portuguese attacked and kidnaped the local populace hoping to sell them as slaves or get ransom. This strategy worked until they suffered the first military defeats by the poisoned arrows of local warriors in Senegambia. It didn't take long for the Portuguese to adapt and refocus their expansion efforts into establishing commercial relations with the new sovereigns and communities they encountered. Trade would be the new language of enduring peace, as soon as the difficulties (especially in communication) of the first contacts could be overcome.

The establishment of commercial relations in the West African coast created new distribution channels and demand patterns, giving a renewed centrality to what was a peripheral region. This affected equilibriums, created breaks, and potentiated conflicts. Nonetheless, it also created conditions for cooperation and diplomatic alliances, as well as religious conversions. Either way, Africans were always the key decision makers in these dynamics. They were the overlords who fiercely controlled European presence in their lands.

But how to further study this agency if there are no known local written sources and the Portuguese documents are understandably euro-focused? This presentation addresses the fact that literary sources can be a trove of knowledge if read with the right questions. Travel literature (itineraries, geographic and ethnographic descriptions, reports and chronicles), can be looked beyond its European mindset to give us new avenues of research that unveils the center role of these African agents.

Paper short abstract:

This communication intends to discuss the scenario of transatlantic slave trade between city of Bahia and Slave Coast during the second half of the 18th century, after the Pombaline provision of 1756, which put an end to the monopoly of the merchants of Salvador on this trade.

Paper long abstract:

This communication intends to discuss the transatlantic slave trade between the city of Bahia and the Slave Coast during the second half of the 18th century, seeking to understand the unfolding of the measures taken by the government of d. Joseph and his minister, marquis of Pombal, about this trade. The provision, edited in 1756, by the administration of d. Joseph made free the slave trade between Bahia and Slave Coast, until then monopolized by a small group of business man based in the square of Bahia. This measure, as well as others promoted by Pombal, was linked to the restructuring actions of the Portuguese maritime empire. Against this background, businessmen from the city of Salvador devised strategies to try to reassert control over the Atlantic slave trade of Bahia. To this end, they acted especially, assuming, between the decades of 1760 and 1780, positions in the Inspection Committee, organ created by the Pombaline administration to regulate the slave trade and the export of sugar and smoke in the capitania of Bahia. The analysis of trades, reports and letters produced by the colonial bureaucracy, especially by the Inspection Committee, allows us to understand the disputes over control over the slave trade between Bahia and the Slave Coast and how the former business man acted in favor of their interests.

Paper short abstract:

This communication aims to analyze the strategies and trajectories of the social agents involved in the long-distance caravans in the Angolan Central Highlands - the "sertanejos", the pumbeiros and the African porters - in the period after the legal prohibition of transatlantic slave trade.

Paper long abstract:

Even though the 1836's prohibition didn't end with the Atlantic slave trade in Angola, many historians have pointed out that this historic process have caused profound social transformations, because of the colonial needs of diversification of exports to invest in the so called "legitimate" commerce. In the Central Highlands, region outside Portuguese colonial jurisdiction, the growing commerce of ivory and wax also prompted important social transformations through the engaging of Central-Africans of the non-ruling lineages as leaders in the long-distance caravans. In this communication, using information from the daily reports of the Portuguese-born "sertanejo" merchant António Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto, written between 1846 and 1869, that registers the everyday relations between the members of the caravan society, we aim to discuss the social strategies and personal choices of the main agents of this regional commerce: the chiefs of the caravans - the "sertanejos" - dealing simultaneously with the African chiefs, the Portuguese Colonial administration and the coastal warehouses; their intermediaries - the pumbeiros (also called kesongos) - using the commerce as an opportunity of social ascension in their hierarchic societies; and the crowd of Central African porters, that are constantly negotiating their survival.