Session Abstract

The Iberian expansion overseas started in the Atlantic when the Portuguese set sail for the first time to the Atlantic Islands of Azores and Madeira during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the first 150 years, the often called ‘Portuguese Atlantic’ was a fluid link between North and South. The ships sailing to ports in present-day Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Kongo and Angola, headed back to Portugal, Spain, as well as Madeira, Azores and the Canaries loaded with enslaved Africans, gold, ivory and other African products. Even the Spanish Conquest of Spanish America did not drastically change the organizational frame of this first Iberian Atlantic. As recent scholarship shows the main source of enslaved Africans brought to the Spanish American colonies was Angola located in West Central Africa and many investors in this business were still based in Europe (Klein, 2004; Almeida Mendes, 2008; Ribeiro da Silva, 2009). The so-called South Atlantic complex would start to take shape in the second half of the sixteenth century with the growing settlement in Brazil, the increasing economic exploitation of the land for cash-crops, the arrival of rival European merchants and warfare driven by European States into this vast region. It is within this context that new Atlantic identities, social constructs, economic interests and alliances linking both Portuguese and Dutch Brazil, and more generally South America to Angola and West Central Africa at large arose (Alencastro, 2000). The result of these new developments was the birth of new social, economic and cultural dynamics in this new South Atlantic Complex that would considerably differ from the Caribbean and North American complexes. This session will explore the reasons why the South Atlantic became a social and economic complex of its own and how that particular identity evolved between the settlement of the Portuguese in Brazil and the independence of the colony in 1822. By looking into 300 years of changes and cross-imperial relationships, we wish to establish the structural foundations of the South Atlantic socio-economic construct, which during this time was transformed into a particular social, economic and cultural identity.