Slave Trade and Abolition offers a concise, detail-packed account of Luanda’s history at a time when transatlantic efforts to end the slave trade propelled the Portuguese colony’s transition to ‘legitimate commerce’. Vanessa Oliveira asks how Luanda-based merchants and residents were affected by the commercial reorientation away from enslaved Africans and towards tropical commodities. In effective and pointed writing, she demonstrates that Luanda’s merchant class, once heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, successfully shifted their commercial focus in large part because of their already diversified economic portfolio. Moreover, in the wake of the slave trade’s decline, Luanda grew rapidly because of the expansion of local slavery. The end of the slave trade in Angola, Oliveira reveals, did not spell the end of slavery and extant dynamics of racial capitalism. Local elites here, as in slave societies in the Americas, remained committed to slavery and the profits it generated. In this manner, they cemented many of the social-racial inequalities that stymied African descendants’ socio-economic ascent in the Atlantic World.

Slave Trade and Abolition’s six chapters deftly guide the reader through major developments in Luanda’s history: from its sixteenth-century foundation to its pre-eminent role as a transatlantic slave trading port in the nineteenth century; from the social and economic ascent of its mixed-descendant, Luso-African women to the invigorated practice of slavery that made mid-nineteenth-century Luanda 40 per cent slave. Each chapter offers a compelling contribution to the history of slavery, race and gender in the Atlantic World. Chapter 1 illuminates the complex network of large, medium and small-scale traders who orchestrated the largest coerced movement of enslaved people from Africa across the Atlantic. Chapter 2 inserts the Luso-African women of Luanda within the vibrant historiographical conversation about African women’s role in facilitating the workings of the transatlantic slave trade and the gendered-racial dynamics that shaped local merchant elites in Africa. Chapter 3 reconstructs the local economy of food production that provisioned the city and fed captives destined for the slave ships. It sets up the argument about the transition to legitimate commerce by highlighting the overlap between networks of producers, transporters and traders that sustained this commercial sector and the one that sustained the slave trade. Chapter 4 demonstrates that, despite Portugal’s efforts to ban the trade in enslaved people in Luanda, longstanding financial and interpersonal ties between slave traders and imperial officials undermined Portuguese policies. It was the suppression of the trade in Brazil and Cuba that ultimately effected the end of Luanda’s prolific commerce in captives. Chapter 5 reveals Luanda merchants’ use of transatlantic partners, credit networks, strategic marriages and control of the city’s hinterland to profit from the shift to a commodity-based trade. Luso-African women’s centrality to some of these strategies, moreover, ensured their high social-racial status despite rising racist attitudes towards black women elsewhere in the Atlantic World. Finally, in examining urban slavery in Chapter 6, Oliveira underscores the relevance of Luanda as a critical case study of the economic opportunities and paths to freedom that enslaved people forged in Atlantic cities.

There is much to appreciate in Slave Trade and Abolition’s rich descriptive narrative. The book is less effective, however, when offering analytical insights. For the most part, it relies on its readers to piece together Oliveira’s research findings and draw their own conclusions about Luanda’s historical relevance. Engaging in this exercise can, nonetheless, pay off. For this reader, the book’s treatment of Luso-African women, Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva in particular, was quite inspiring. Joaquina emerges as a powerful personage in Luanda’s economy and society in Oliveira’s writing. By tracing her personal finances, economic ventures, family and business connections, Oliveira uncovers crucial features of the slave trade (legal and illegal), of the internal trade in foodstuffs, of the growth of legitimate commerce and of slaveholding in Luanda. Oliveira also reveals the complex and sometimes unexpected gender and racial dynamics that produced a local merchant elite. She ends the book with the story of Joaquina’s decision to disinherit her only daughter, who married her main business competitor. It seems that business priorities, and perhaps the desire to posthumously shape Luanda’s merchant elite, informed the prominent merchant’s decision to use Portuguese laws to skip a generation of heirs. Dona Ana Joaquina deserves her spot in the pantheon of African-European women who challenge our understandings of women’s role in the formation of the early modern Atlantic World. Oliveira is to be commended for bringing her and other Luso-African women of Luanda to our attention. Hopefully she will follow this book with more work on their stories.