The Transatlantic Slave Trade, Merchants and Rural Elites in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, the Main Port of the South Atlantic

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.