Slave Trade and Abolition is a beautifully written book that provides detailed insight into the social transformations catalysed in Luanda by the age of abolition. It does this by recognizing the complex transnational nature of Luanda’s constitution, thereby understanding Luanda as a space through which to read a global history. The book sheds light on how different moments of abolition – the British ban, Portugal’s barring of the sale of enslaved people from its ports, and, finally, Brazil’s 1867 prohibition on the importation of slaves from Africa – altered the gender, economic, racial and class relations that had been wrought by the world of transatlantic slavery. Through analysing these processes, the book reveals how the Atlantic slave trade and its end ushered in the conditions for the production of new racial hierarchies and the accompanying forms of domination that followed it.

The book is an invaluable introduction to Luanda’s history for those unacquainted with the city’s past. Beginning with its founding in 1575 in the context of a rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade, the book quickly moves to the primary period under consideration – the nineteenth century – with each chapter moving the reader chronologically through the period as well as shedding light on different aspects of life in Luanda. Vanessa Oliveira deftly provides an account of the gender relations, racial classifications, land ownership, legal systems, agriculture and social make-up of Luanda. Weaving all these various aspects of life together is the fact of enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade. The book sensitively shows how enslaved people and their fates stood at the heart of a society that overwhelmingly relied on them for its economic reproduction.

Contrary to much of the literature on the transition from the slave trade to ‘legitimate’ trade, Oliveira reveals that the two trades were what she describes as ‘complementary’. Wealth from the slave trade enabled slavers to pivot successfully into legitimate trade. Slave traders often invested their wealth in property, with many of them supplying food to the city and ships during the transatlantic slave trade. As income from the slave trade declined, those with means and existing land holdings were able to capitalize on them to be among the first to speculate on new crops such as sugar, coffee and cotton. Many of the former slave traders were also the primary suppliers of credit to small businesses and provided financial support to the colonial administration. They were able to use their influence to capitalize on new opportunities.

If the class structure of a slave society appeared to be reproducing itself, it was the shifts in understandings of race that interrupted these logics. As Oliveira argues, status became increasingly linked to racial classification rather than family and wealth. In an otherwise wonderfully detailed book, it would have been good to see more time spent on the question of race so as to better understand what appears to be the sudden emergence of racist attitudes. Until the moment of abolition, Oliveira not only presents the category of ‘white’ as an expansive and fluid one, but there also seems to be very little racial discrimination within Luanda society. While the book does mention the rise of scientific racism more generally, it is difficult to comprehend how racial attitudes that had structured a society for so long could simply be so quickly undone. It therefore raises more questions about race and its transformations before, during and after the period of abolition: what were the relationships between previous notions of race and the more hierarchized ones that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century? How were the new ones able to so quickly destroy those which had structured Luanda society for centuries? In what areas, in addition to gender, did new hardened racial attitudes make themselves felt? How did this begin to affect property holding and other kinds of wealth? Much work on the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in Luanda focuses on the significance of the fall of the earlier slave-owning elite, who, between the period that Oliveira discusses and the early twentieth century, appear to have lost almost all their urban property, broader land holdings and economic investments. Hardened attitudes towards race and new regulations accompanying them seem key to this. Oliveira points the reader towards the racialized shift that initiated this unravelling, providing a key step to better understanding how Luanda’s social make-up could change so radically by the mid-twentieth century. What is needed now is deeper research on race and its transformations, so that the longue durée effects of the transformations that Oliveira exquisitely narrates and analyses can be better understood.