Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, C. 1550-1830 FROM THE PUBLISHER
This volume focuses on the topic at Luanda and its Hinterland, where the connections between foreign alcohol and the slave export trade reached their zenith. Here, following the mid-1500s, an extremely close relationship developed between imported intoxicants and slaves exported, by the thousands in any given year, into the Atlantic World: first, fortified Portuguese wine and, following 1650, Brazilian rum emerged as crucial trade goods for the acquisition of slaves. But the significance of Luso-Brazilian intoxicants goes far beyond this singular fact: they also served a number of other functions, some of which were directly tied to slave trading and others indirectly underpinned the business. The volume addresses the problem of alcohol in African history, historicizes "indigenous" alcoholic beverages in West-Central Africa at the time of contact and analyzes the introduction and increasing use of foreign intoxicants for the acquisition of exportable slaves. It also ponders the profits that such transactions generated within the Atlantic world and reconstructs the other uses of imported alcohol in directly and indirectly underpinning the export slave made of Luanda Furthermore; the impact of foreign alcohol upon West-Central African consumers is assessed.
SYNOPSIS
Curto (history, York U., Toronto) has revised his 1996 Ph.D. dissertation for the University of California, Los Angeles by incorporating his subsequent research in Angolan and Brazilian archives into information he had originally found in Portuguese archives. He focuses on Luanda and it environs, where the practice of exchanging imported alcohol beverages for exportable slaves was heaviest, but also considers other parts of West Central Africa from about 1550 to the end of legal slaving in the South Atlantic in 1830. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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