In this forum about the book Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: a history of dispossession, slavery, and inequality, I will focus not on Mariana Candido’s central argument about conceptions of landownership rights for West Central Africans but instead on how her work may be seen as engaging broader discussions about capitalism and slavery. Many generations of scholars intervening in these debates have tended to focus on the rise of capitalism, teleologically, by centring their analysis on Great Britain and the United States rather than re-examining the more expansive geographies and timelines of the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic World. Because Portugal is an odd choice to be labelled as ‘the cradle of capitalism’, the lengthy history of slavery connecting Portugal, Brazil and Angola is frequently overlooked or shoehorned into British and US frameworks, categories, agents and timelines. This becomes even more puzzling when considering that Brazil was the most significant destination for captive Africans throughout the entire history of the slave trade, and West Central Africa was the most important broad area of embarkation for enslaved men, women and children headed to the Americas.

My first question brings England into a consideration of the differing outcomes in Angola regarding the connections between land property rights and labour. In her examination of the debates about the origins of capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood asserts that market dependence – or, put another way, market imperatives – led to the privatization of communal land in England starting in the 1600s and continuing until the 1800s. Throughout this period, this process created a dispossessed class of labourers.Footnote ¹ In contrast, in Angola, Candido shows how colonial forces pushed for the privatization and marketization of communal land owned by West Central African communities, bringing new significance to the implementation of slavery and, more broadly, coerced labour in Angola, paradoxically during times of emancipation. I wonder if we can reconcile these views by arguing that nineteenth-century Portuguese colonialism expressed market imperatives on the ground, resulting in seemingly divergent outcomes in Europe and Africa.

I can’t help but marvel at the parallels and differences between the events in the metropolis and the colonies when comparing England and Portugal with their respective colonial experience in the Americas and Africa. Citing Wood again, Candido argues that the implementation of ideas about land in the Americas led English intellectuals such as John Locke to articulate for the first time concepts of improvement, value and property rights concerning land more transparently during the seventeenth century, and this supported indigenous dispossession and the slave trade while agrarian capitalism was well under way in England.Footnote ² We can observe similarities later in nineteenth-century Portugal and Angola, where Portuguese intellectuals first reflected on land property rights while dispossessing communal land owned by West Central Africans. However, there is a notable difference. According to Candido, the privatization and marketization of land in Angola preceded this process in Portugal (pp. 76–96). This trend of privatizing communal land was not solely linked to colonialism, as evidenced by the Lerdo reforms in postcolonial Mexico in 1856, which forcibly placed on the market land owned communally by indigenous populations. While we can observe parallels from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, I wonder if there is something unique about the nineteenth century, possibly linked to liberalism becoming omnipresent.

Finally, my third intervention focuses on Candido’s last chapter, which invites reflections on how capitalism has shaped identities, transforming the perceptions of those belonging to communal identities into increasingly individualistic ideas of the self through the consumption of goods. In precolonial Africa, scholars have typically studied elites – those most in contact with slave traders from Europe and the Americas – while examining consumption through primary sources such as the diary written by the Efik slave trader Antera Duke in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ³ The recent turn to material culture also examines ‘objects of prestige’ brought by European merchants as gifts for African dignitaries, revealing individualistic consumption based on unique objects.Footnote ⁴ With her study of wills, Candido offers a much more horizontal perspective on consumption, beyond elites and centred on women. External goods consumed by Angolan women did not necessarily come from Europe and the USA but from Brazil and India; these included food, drink, dress, jewellery and furniture. In this regard, I wonder how this chapter may be used as a window to explore changes in identity and affiliation among the women who left these wills.