From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (review)

From Africa to Brazil covers a time span of just over two hundred years, focusing on Upper Guineans' migration to Maranhão from 1621 to 1830. Walter Hawthorne has assembled sources in a variety of archives in Portugal, Guinea Bissau, and Brazil to write a history of Upper Guinean diaspora, where the ports of Bissau, Cacheu, São Luis, and Belém are connected not only by the slave trade but also by the circulation of ideas and crops. The main merit of Hawthorne's study is filling a gap in the scholarship on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade by emphasizing the interaction of African slaves with the native population of the Amazon, in a process of exchange, collaboration, and competition. This study expands our knowledge about the Atlantic world and the role of Africans in creating new cultures and re-orienting old customs. We know a great deal about the slave trade in the North Atlantic but very little about its counterpart in smaller routes, such the one linking Upper Guinea to the Amazon. Few scholars have explored the movement of Upper Guineans into the New World, despite a great deal of attention to other African groups such as the Akan, Kongo, or Minas. Thus, this study would be a major contribution if it only studied Upper Guineans' presence in the Maranhão; however, Hawthorne went further by writing an Atlantic history with an Afrocentric approach, setting a model for future studies. His book also expands our knowledge about slavery in Brazil. Although the literature on slavery in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Minas Gerais is abundant, few studies have focused on slavery in Maranhão, particularly before the nineteenth century. In From Africa to Brazil readers gain a clear picture of the structure of the slave trade to the Amazon and slave life in Maranhão. Hawthorne shows a great concern for aspects of cultural and daily life, moving away from a demographic focus on the slave trade that still dominates the literature.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first deals with the reasons and motivations behind the enslavement of Upper Guinea Africans and their transportation to Maranhão. It contains three chapters exploring the transition from indigenous to African slave labor, the mechanisms of enslavement on the Upper Guinea coast; and the new conditions Upper Guineans faced in the diaspora. The second part offers a cultural approach to the analysis of the presence of Upper Guineans in the Amazon region, including a discussion of the rice debate, violence, sex and family life, and continuities of spiritual beliefs. Hawthorne shows how contact with the Atlantic world transformed not only political and economic life, but also increased interactions among inhabitants of Upper Guinea, who tended to be identified as Guiné in Portuguese sources. Through a careful and convincing analysis of historical evidence, Hawthorne examines how Upper Guineans appropriated the concept of Guiné to their own benefit, re-creating institutions that unified Balanta, Papel, Biafada, Floup, and others, under this new nação, or "nation," in Maranhão. Although languages and political structures did not survive colonialism and slavery, Upper Guineans managed to reorganize their life under this new collective denominative of Guiné, at the same time they maintained their ethnonyms. Engaging with the debate on creolization initiated by Melville Herskovits, Sidney Mintz, and Richard Price, and followed by James Sweet, among others, Hawthorne argues that rice agriculture and cultural institutions were creolized in Maranhão, precisely to bring Upper Guineans together, rather than dividing them into the groups that coexisted in Upper Guinea. On the rice debate, Hawthorne shows that rice culture in Maranhão was not the result of slave masters' tight control or exclusively Africans' contribution, but a combination of factors. A different soil and new labor regime forced Upper Guineans to rely on previous experiences and adjust to the new environment, developing new agricultural methods to cultivate rice, but maintaining...