Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, C. 1550-1830 (The Atlantic World, 2)

Consumer goods not only have a past of their own, but are also part and parcel of historical processes. In Africa, for example, cloves, kola, maize, tobacco, and salt all played significant economic, political, and social roles both in the more distant and the not too distant past. 1 These items, however, were not the only consumer goods of significance in the African past. Not a few others were of equal, possibly even greater, significance in the history of Africa. One of these was intoxicating beverages. Indeed, the history of alcohol in Africa is more than a trivial element in the economic, political, and social development of the continent. The beginning of this past, which stretches very deep in time, can not be precisely dated. 2 Nevertheless, the production and consumption of intoxicating drinks may well have begun when Africans started to shift their subsistence from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Following this transition, which took place at different times in different regions of the continent, five main groups of intoxicants were already being produced: beverages fermented from cereals, honey water, fruits and juices, and sap from various species of palm trees, as well as drinks made from milk. 3 Because these alcoholic beverages were made from items that were part and parcel of the food supply, this must have placed limits on both their production and consumption. Thus, while it is unlikely that production was carried out on a large scale, whatever amounts of alcoholic beverages existed were primarily consumed during more or less strictly defined social and religious occasions. 4 By and large, these early characteristics of intoxicants in Africa seem to have remained stable for millennia. But, with the arrival of Europeans in the continent, alcohol consumption patterns began to undergo significant changes.

Long recognized as having played many important roles in the slave export trade of western Africa, foreign alcohol and its various functions within this context have nevertheless escaped systematic analysis. 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, analyzes the introduction and increasing use of foreign intoxicants for the acquisition of exportable slaves, ponders the profits that such transactions generated within the Atlantic world, reconstructs the other uses of imported alcohol in directly and indirectly underpinning the export slave trade of Luanda, and assesses the impact of foreign alcohol upon West-Central African consumers.

Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Maps and Illustrations Introduction Alcohol as History in Africa Chapter One Alcohol in Early Modern West Central Africa Chapter Two The Introduction of Bacchus Into West Central Africa Chapter Three The Reign of Bacchus: Portuguese Alcohol at Luanda and its Hinterland During the Early Slave Trade, c. 1550-1649 Chapter Four The Downfall of Bacchus: Brazilian Traders, Portuguese Capitalists and the Struggle for the Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1650-1699 Chapter Five The Long Century of Gerebita: The Luso-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1700-1830 Chapter Six The Profits of Luso-Brazilian Alcohol in Slaving at Luanda and its Hinterland Chapter Seven Underpinning the Slave Trade: Other Uses of Luso-Brazilian Alcohol in Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1575-1830 Conclusion The Impact of Portuguese and Brazilian Intoxicants Appendix Graphs Bibliography Index THE ATLANTIC WORLD This volume deals with imported alcohol at Luanda and its hinterland, where it was heavily used to acquire captives for the Atlantic slave trade. Aside from highlighting the complexities of this singular economic component of Atlantic slaving, its focus on changing West -Central African alcohol consumption patterns through the importation of foreign intoxicants reveals an important element of the social history of African societies before the modern colonial period. In his account of the mid-fifteenth century Portuguese "discoveries" along the coast of West Africa, the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara stated with some astonishment that the inhabitants of this region did not know of vinho or wine extracted from grapes.