Multiple Legacies

The legacies of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade remain visible and active today in various parts of the continents involved in the Atlantic slave trade and where slavery existed.

By telling the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas, this book aimed to underscore that this tragic history of violence, resistance, and resilience cannot be told accurately without emphasizing the importance of Brazil, West Africa, and West Central Africa, and the central role of enslaved women in this multi-century-long process. The largest contingent of enslaved Africans was transported to the Americas from the ports located in present-day Angola, which is why West Central Africa played a crucial role in the economic and cultural formation of the Americas. Port cities such as Luanda and Benguela became Portuguese colonies along with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. As a whole, today’s Angola was among the very few last African countries to become independent from European rule, in 1975.

The number of enslaved Africans transported to Brazil was the largest in the Americas. Moreover, the contingent of captive Africans who came ashore in Brazil is nearly ten times the number of enslaved Africans introduced in the United States.

Although African women were sent into slavery to the Americas in smaller numbers than men, their work and reproductive capacities were pivotal pillars for the upholding of slavery in the Americas. The role of enslaved women became even more central especially in the United States during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, a period known as the second slavery. Because the acquisition and transportation of enslaved persons from Africa to the Americas had been gradually banned starting in 1807, slave owners started relying on the illegal transportation of captive Africans to Cuba and Brazil, and mainly on the wombs of bondswomen who gave birth to enslaved children in the United States.

During the second slavery, although relying on an enslaved workforce, cotton, sugar, and coffee production increasingly drew on mechanization and technological innovation. Therefore, in this phase, the slavery mode of production proved itself compatible with the development of industrial capitalism. Ultimately, the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas were designed and shaped to generate profits that benefited slave traders and their multiple intermediaries, as well as slave owners, through the ownership and exploitation of Black Africans and their descendants. The work provided by enslaved people also contributed to build the wealth and propel the industrialization of countries and regions, such as Britain and the North of the United States, even when slavery was no longer a central institution or had already been abolished in these regions.²⁸ The chapters of this book have also shown that the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and then of Africans and their descendants in the Americas accelerated the creation of racial categories that ostracized these groups, giving rise to anti-Black racism.

Although recognizing that Atlantic slavery was a mode of production based on the ownership of human beings, this book is a new effort to write the history of bondage and the trade of enslaved Africans to the Americas through the lens of memory. This perspective of the study of the past centers the lived experiences of the men, women, and children who were victims of these atrocities. By privileging Africa, Brazil, Black women, and resistance in my analysis, this book also seeks to add to our understanding of the formation of contemporary societies in the Americas, and by doing so, it also recognizes how this very long period of human atrocities in our history continues to haunt our present.