Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World

This book argues that Angola and Brazil were connected, not separated, by the Atlantic Ocean. Roquinaldo Ferreira focuses on the cultural, religious, and social impacts of the slave trade on Angola. Reconstructing biographies of Africans and merchants, he demonstrates how cross-cultural trade, identity formation, religious ties, and resistance to slaving were central to the formation of the Atlantic world. By adding to our knowledge of the slaving process, the book powerfully illustrates how Atlantic slaving transformed key African institutions, such as local regimes of forced labor that predated and coexisted with Atlantic slaving, and made them fundamental features of the Atlantic world's social fabric.

• A qualitative study of the slave trade in the south Atlantic world
• Focuses on the various ways, not just military or by force, in which African peoples became enslaved
• Microhistorical focus shows the social and cultural landscapes of Angola during the era of the slave trade