Vanessa S. Oliveira’s Slave Trade and Abolition constitutes another point of support in our understanding of the role and place of women in the construction of the Atlantic during nineteenth-century slavery. By studying documentation related to Luanda kept mainly in Angolan and Portuguese archives, the author builds a book in which she highlights the actions of several women from Luanda, the Donas, who were mainly Luso-African, in the Atlantic slave trade between 1816 and 1865. The fact that women were slave owners and participated in the transatlantic trade of enslaved persons is an increasingly well-known topic. This work clearly contributes to widen our knowledge by systematically studying those women from Angola who were involved in these deals. In this sense, Oliveira acknowledges her debt to, among other authors, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Philip J. Havik, Mariana Candido, and especially Selma Pantoja. The work combines the abundant historiography on slavery in this period and on Angola with archival work that provides new information on the actions of some of the prominent slave owners, while also attending to the economic role of other women – both slaves and free – in the construction of the market and the economy of Luanda.

One of the strong points of this work lies in its detailed examination of how slaveholders adapted to British anti-slavery legislation and treaties signed with Portugal that restricted the continuation of the legal slave trade. This generated two responses that were not mutually exclusive: the first was to use the revenues from the slave trade to promote investment and agricultural diversification in Angola, with the Lisbon government’s firm commitment to ‘colonial’ products (cotton, sugar, coffee, etc.); the second was to participate in the highly lucrative illegal slave trade after 1836. In this way, as the author demonstrates and as historiography shows, the slave trade was always a business sustained by other activities, such as the production of agricultural products, the importation of goods from Brazil and Europe, and investment in Brazil.

The use of the concept of ‘gender’ in the title refers to the broad conception of gender as a historiographical tool that Joan W. Scott has already developed;Footnote ¹ that is why Oliveira pays attention to the economic activity and social role that the men of Luanda played alongside these women, as slaveholders and agricultural producers. In this way, it is possible to understand the exact quantitative and qualitative dimensions that corresponded to the participation of these women in local food markets, in investment in land for the production of colonial products, and in their involvement in the slave trade and in the legal trade of agricultural products, responding to the challenges of a changing world, as discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. One of the most outstanding elements in the book is its discussion of the role of the Luso-African women in the social ascent of newcomers and those born in Angola. This is especially clear in the case of the former, as we read in Chapter 2, since these women’s knowledge of Kimbundu and Portuguese, their hybrid cultural identity and their connections with the interior of the continent, Lisbon and Brazil made them privileged intermediaries in the worlds in which their persons converged.

Despite these notable strengths, the author could have examined certain aspects in greater depth. For instance, Oliveira makes a comparison between Luanda and the situation in other parts of Africa, and I consider that she could have taken this comparison back to works that already address these issues for earlier dates and American spaces, such as that elaborated by David Wheat or in his book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean,Footnote ² which also attends to Africans’ early access to land in the Caribbean. This would have further strengthened her conclusions by illustrating that both custom and law, with Roman roots and elaborated through laws such as the Ordenações Filipinas, with all their limitations, sustained the position of these women from the expansion of the Iberian monarchies in the Atlantic. Along the same lines, the comparison with Brazil could have given even more nuances to the author’s conclusions, since there are numerous works that approach the role of women as agrarian producers and slave owners who operated on the other side of the Atlantic, and who clearly shared a similar culture. The works of Dantas, Guedes and Paiva show the reflection of the rise of African women, but also of crioulas and of hybrid identity, in the construction of a Lusitanian Atlantic.Footnote ³ As for the profile of the slave traders and the organization of the traffic in slaves, although it is cited, a greater dialogue and the establishment of mutual influences with the classic work by Manolo FlorentinoFootnote ⁴ would have been welcome. The comparative proposal made here does not seek to highlight shortcomings in this work, but rather to underline the research results obtained by Oliveira, which complement those that have been developed by Brazilian historiography. Likewise, the author achieves a remarkable balance between historiography and her research results. The solid structure of the book, which deals with very different and new aspects of the life of these women in nineteenth-century Angola, is also notable.