TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 2, 2025):

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America. More slave ships left for the West African coast from the Americas than from Europe; the majority of those vessels sailed from Brazil, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. The foundations of modern Brazil are poured over the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade.

Yet, though the history of Brazilian slavery is not “untold”, the histories of Caribbean and North American slavery are generally better known among anglophone readers. Two new books by distinguished historians of slavery, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic history of slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo and Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic slave trades by David Eltis, offer a correction, emphasizing the longevity and scale of slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic. In Enslavement: Past and present, another distinguished academic, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, shows the relevance and utility of his theory of slavery as “social death”, a powerlessness whose malignance structures slave societies and persists long after emancipation. What follows, however, from recognizing that Brazil was first, last and largest in Atlantic slavery? Slavery existed long before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; are the ruins of the slave-ship dock under Rio relics of the longue durée of enslavement or evidence of the violent birth of the modern world?

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