Across the Atlantic world, major anti-slave-trade legislation did not produce full freedom for African captives. Instead, different jurisdictions subjected the ‘liberated’ captives to bonded labour arrangements such as apprenticeship, often with poor oversight. Accordingly, some scholars have interpreted the records of suppression as a mortuary archive. Others have examined the local political conditions on the Angolan coast as the Portuguese colonial authorities suppressed the trade from Luanda, enabling traders in Benguela, Cabinda, and Ambriz to take advantage. From a legal perspective, scholars have argued that coercion and value exchange overlapped in resolving disputes between the different sovereign powers involved in suppression, including the British empire, Brazilian government, and African political authorities in Atlantic Africa. The era of suppression dovetailed with Brazilian state-building through warfare, enabling new insights into the relationship between slavery, free soil, and sovereignty.

This panel takes these arguments further by focusing on a series of case studies, stretching from West Central Africa to Brazil. How far did anti-slave-trade practices align with Portuguese imperial projects in West Africa after the loss of Brazil? How did Angola’s strong connections with Brazil shape the course of abolition in the south Atlantic? How did new anti-slave-trade laws in Brazil bolster or undermine the law of slavery and of freedom? How does the troubling process of suppression help us rethink the history of the South Atlantic?

This panel should appeal to scholars interested in the history of slavery and freedom, Atlantic history, African history, and Latin American history.