Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (review)

Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World is a groundbreaking historical study of the transatlantic slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries involving Angola, Brazil, and Portugal that emphasizes the movement and networks of people, capital, and sociocultural practices across the South Atlantic. Roquinaldo Ferreira’s compelling work entails a microhistory built largely on the life stories of black, mixed race, and white men and women—free and enslaved—who not only were shaped by, but who were also agents in cross-South Atlantic political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics in connection to the slave trade. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World is the result of extensive archival research conducted in Angola and Portugal over a period of fifteen years based on historical accounts through a plethora of legal and official documents (letters, reports, powers of attorney, wills, certificates, requests, announcements, testimonies, legal opinions, speeches, instructions, inventories, memoirs, etc). From this multitudinous array of documents, the author pieces together the life stories of a series of remarkable, yet mostly subaltern, individuals, as well as the complex intertwined transoceanic societies in which they lived.

Through the lives of Francisco Roque Santo (a white Brazilian slave ship captain and merchant), Jorge Inácio (a free black Angolan man, enslaved and sent to Rio de Janeiro), Manoel de Salvador (shipped to Rio de Janeiro as a child slave, but returning later on to Luanda), and Mariana Fernandes (a free Angolan black widow accused of witchcraft), among many others, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic provides rich insights into the various dimensions of Angolan slave society. Chapters one (“Expedition to the Kingdom of Holo”) and two (“Can Vassals Be Enslaved?”) focus on the actors and commodities involved in the Angolan internal and external slave trade networks, the strategic commercial and diplomatic relations between Luanda and the African kingdoms of Matamba and Kassanje, and the heavy toll exacted on African social institutions by the itinerant hinterland slave trade. Chapter three (“Tribunal de Mucanos”) is a fascinating study of “the interwoven nature of customs, power, and law in colonial Angola” reflected in its hybridized legal system, which included the tribunal de mucanos (African customary law) and Portuguese law (99). In the former, freeborn Africans could regain their freedom, as well as seek reparations and punishment against enslavers—a historical insight that significantly enriches our contemporary understanding of the African side of the transatlantic slave trade. Chapter four (“Slavery and Society”) discusses multiple social and cultural facets of slave life in Luanda, including the linguistic landscape, the important role of taverns, public safety, and social control, as well as the fear of deportation to Brazil. Chapter five (“Religion and Culture”) delves into the landscape of syncretic religious practices and transculturated communities, including the role of degredados (exiled criminals) in Luanda. Finally, chapter six (“Echoes of Brazil”) examines the secessionist movement in Benguela at the time of Brazilian independence.

By establishing connections between microlevel events and macrolevel processes, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World asserts the pivotal importance of the Angola-Brazil lifeline over three hundred years in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the key role of Brazilian administrators, traders, and soldiers in colonial Angola. Furthermore, it illustrates the direct influence of Brazil over Angolan colonial society and political economy at various junctures. For instance, Ferreira highlights the impact of the gold mines of Minas Gerais in the 18th century and the consequent greater demand for slaves and the widespread availability of credit (and consequently of pawnship and debt regimes) in Angola. Also, Ferreira discusses the complex reverberations of Brazilian independence within the tense internal geopolitics of the Angolan colonial state involving different segments of the population in Luanda and Benguela. This trenchant study builds on and moves beyond the vast, well-established and indispensable bibliography based on quantitative macrological accounts of the transatlantic slave trade by...