From Luanda to Buenos Aires: Degredados and the South Atlantic Slave Trade, c. 1580–1700

 

“From Luanda to Buenos Aires: Degredados and the South Atlantic Slave Trade,

c. 1580-1700"

 

My paper explores cross-cultural collaboration and the creation of informal empires through an examination of Portuguese armed forces in seventeenth-century Angola and their participation in the slave trade to the Americas.

Angola had a difficult time attracting Portuguese settlement and faced chronic troop shortages. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Brazilians were sent to Angola as military reinforcements for Portuguese and African troops fighting rival European powers and African states in order to expand the frontiers of the slave trade. Although many of the soldiers who served in Angola were forcibly transported as degredados (criminal and religious exiles) or slaves, many remained in Angola once their terms of service concluded. Soldiers’ familiarity with multiple cultural contexts placed them in an advantageous position to extend the reach of Portuguese power in West Central Africa, but these “free agents” also used their knowledge for personal gain. Through marriage, godparentage, and military service, soldiers fostered cross-cultural alliances that strengthened existing economic networks. Rank-and-file soldiers, for whom a criminal past or skin color might have impeded social advancement in Portugal or Brazil, built slave-trading networks that stretched from Luanda to Buenos Aires, traversing the boundaries of empire.

Using criminal processes, Inquisition cases, military petitions, and political correspondence drawn from Portuguese, Spanish, and Angolan archives, I trace these trans-imperial trade routes and the collaboration that undergirded them. I argue that such soldiers set in motion the broad patterns that characterized the South Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, both enhancing and subverting the metropolitan agenda.