80 pages, paperback
14,8 x 21,0, 2024

The thousands of African slaves and goods taken to the port of Rio de Janeiro in the eighteenth century had to further travel across vast territories, until they reached the numerous markets and agricultural areas of Portuguese America. These territories in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro were controlled by colonial rural elites. The African slave trade depended not only on the dynamics of African societies and on general commercial fluctuations, but also on the particular social system of Portuguese Brazil, which was characterised by land concentration and political disputes between factions of the rural elites. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the port of Rio de Janeiro was situated in the agrarian society of the slave-based Ancien Régime which, in turn, was one of the overseas conquests of the pluricontinental Portuguese monarchy. This essay analyzes the commerce of Rio de Janeiro and the features of the Atlantic trade, highlighting the importance of the dynamics of colonial society for understanding the Atlantic trade, including the slave trade.       
 

The Author

João Fragoso is Full Professor of History at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Conselho Nacional Científico e Tecnológico of Brazil (CNPq). He is the author of the monograph Homens de Grossa Aventura: acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro (1790–1830) [Men of Great Adventure: Accumulation and Hierarchy in Rio de Janeiro’s Mercantile Market (1790–1830)] (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1998 [1st ed. 1992]), which was awarded the Prêmio Arquivo Nacional de Pesquisa (National Archive Research Prize) in 1991. With Fátima Gouvêa, he co-edited the collection O Brasil Colonial (1443–1821), 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2014), which won the Jabuti Prize in the Humanities  category in 2015. He was honoured by the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil in 2010 with the Comenda do Mérito Científico (National Order of Scientific Merit). In 2024, he published A Sociedade Perfeita: origens das desigualdades sociais no Brasil [The Perfect Society: The Origins of Social Inequalities in Brazil] (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2024).