num_pages: 642
description: Macro-level study of the South Atlantic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrating how Brazils emergence was built on the longest and most intense slave trade of the modern era.The seventeenth-century missionary and diplomat Father Antnio Vieira once observed that Brazil was nourished animated sustained served and conserved by the sad blood of the black and unfortunate souls imported from Angola. In The Trade in the Living  Luiz Felipe de Alencastro demonstrates how the African slave trade was an essential element in the South Atlantic and in the ongoing cohesion of Portuguese America while at the same time the concrete interests of Brazilian colonists dependent on Angolan slaves were often violently asserted in Africa to ensure men and commodities continued to move back and forth across the Atlantic. In exposing this intricate and complementary relationship between two non-European continents de Alencastro has fashioned a new and challenging examination of colonial Brazil one that moves beyond its relationship with Portugal to discover a darker hidden history.
language: None
title: The Trade in the Living: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
publisher: State University of New York Press