Brazil and Africa

Humans in Shackles is an Atlantic cultural history of slavery in the Americas that seeks to redress the distortions and imbalances of existing general histories of slavery, which have insisted on centering on the British North Atlantic world, especially the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean colonies.

In addressing this unfair imbalance and approaching the long history of these human atrocities from a panoramic point of view, this book is in dialogue with the work of Marcus Rediker and Jennifer Morgan, who each have called for historians to write human histories of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade that emphasize the lived experience of enslaved men and women, not demographics and economics.¹⁰ This book is also in conversation with the works of historians such as Michael Gomez, Herman Bennett, and Toby Green, who have similarly challenged historians of the Atlantic slave trade to embrace the long history of the African continent instead of engaging with Africa as a mere repository of enslaved labor.¹¹

The persistent emphasis on the British colonies of North America, and later the United States as well as the British West Indies, tends to obscure the real dimensions of slavery and the slave trade in the Americas. Approximately 12 million Africans were brought to the Americas. During the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, approximately 389,000 enslaved persons who had been forced into slave ships in African ports came ashore in mainland North America, and more than 3.4 million disembarked in the British and French West Indies.¹² Yet more than 4.8 million enslaved men, women, and children landed on Brazilian shores, the largest number in the Americas and nearly ten times more than the number of slaves forcibly brought from the African continent to the United States. Brazil was also the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Challenging how the history of African bondage in the Americas is told and written, Humans in Shackles is a hemispheric and Atlantic history of slavery that puts side by side Brazil, the West Indies, the Spanish-speaking Americas, and North America.¹³ To tell this long story, I place Brazil and the South Atlantic system at the center of the narrative, highlighting the realities of African societies during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. My main claim is that Brazil, the Luso-Brazilian slave trade, and its African contexts are central to fully understand the long and painful history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.

Likewise, I argue that slavery in Latin America, including Brazil, was not a benign and more humane institution, as many people, including some scholars and students, still believe. I challenge the widespread and misleading idea that views slavery in Latin America and Brazil as milder compared with the harsh conditions of bondage in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean. Instead, I contend, it was equally as violent, if not more so.