Regimes of property, whether held by African rulers or European administrators, were not transhistorical or total. The written regime of property in Angola emerged in specific contexts, articulated with imperialism, expansion of capitalism, and consolidation of the liberal notion of individual rights at the expense of collective ones. While Portuguese agents enforced a single model of property rights, local chiefs contested this model. Colonial property regimes altered the social order and allowed women, formerly enslaved people, and immigrants, often marginalized groups, to enjoy rights and subvert the economic and social order. The violence that exiled occupants from their own land also justified kidnapping and enslavement. This violence is almost erased in the colonial archives and scholarship that traces a linear progress from slave trade to legitimate trade and imperialism. Nonetheless, violence and appropriation pervade the histories of slavery, property, rights, consumption, and claims.

For most West Central African rulers, land was central to subsistence agriculture, meeting their population needs as well as guaranteeing access to future generations. Chapter 6 traces the discussion about land ownership, examining legal changes and the centrality of paper culture for its commodification. The chapter begins by stressing the role of twentieth-century jurists and colonial officers in defending the idea that no notion of possession and individual ownership ever existed in Africa, while simultaneously creating the narrative that individual property had always existed in Europe. Despite earlier evidence that demonstrates a clear perception of occupation and jurisdiction rights among local rulers and West Central Africans, jurists, missionaries, and later, anthropologists and historians claimed that such rights did not exist, emphasizing the centrality of wealth in people, not in land, as forms of accumulation and wealth. In many ways, ethnographers, jurists, and scholars provided evidence to support colonial claims and ideologies that non-Europeans were incapable of apprehending and protecting the basic concept of ownership. This has had lasting consequences on the scholarship on wealth and accumulation in Africa. The refusal to recognize West Central African possession rights sustained colonialism and legitimated occupation and alienation of land and other resources.

Chapter 7 focuses on the process that transformed West Central Africans from forced laborers into consumers of products manufactured elsewhere. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals the items West Central Africans collected during their lifetimes and the emotional and financial value associated with material culture. Their consumption patterns make it possible to explore the movement of goods, the role of commercial centers, and the changes in taste and fashion. Africans imported items that favored European industries at the expense of their local production, a clear demonstration of how colonial power, dispossession, and dependency have a long history and predate the twentieth century. Rulers and commoners desired material things beyond their basic needs and aspired to buy and collect a variety of goods. They consumed items that connected them to societies around the world and encouraged African political elites and warlords to engage in warfare and other strategies to enslave enemies, exacerbating violence, dispossession, and displacement. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals that African women not only acquired imported goods and transmitted them to loved ones but also made constant efforts to protect the assets they had accumulated during their lives.

The uses and transformations of the concept of land use, occupation, and possession in West Central Africa from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century are examined. Rather than stressing the concept of wealth in people, this chapter explores how people exercised land rights and control and displayed wealth. In West Central Africa, as elsewhere in the continent, claims over land, people, and things were based on and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and the broader social context. The distinction between the public and the private was blurred. Recognition of claims and rights was the result of political and economic competition among rulers, subjects, and neighbors. All actors, some with more power than others, engaged in the definition of land use, rights, occupation, and inheritance, retaining control of goods and wealth that could be expressed in a variety of ways. With the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, more actors engaged in the principle of territorial occupation and subjugation to make bold claims of sovereignty based on the idea that land was unused or unoccupied. Since different ideas of possession and jurisdiction were at the center of these interactions, clashes between conceptions of land use, access, and occupation are analyzed.

Chapter 2 focuses on the fixing and transformation of property rights during the nineteenth century. Possession claims and inheritance practices change over time, and in many ways the available historical evidence hid these changes, reprojecting a nineteenth-century understanding of land regimes. The imposition of land titles and land charts crystallized processes that were fluid until then. Yet the long list of vassalage treaties, inventories, and disputes between African rulers, their neighbors, and the Portuguese analyzed in the chapter provides a clear example of how all actors engaged in a continued negotiation over possession, jurisdiction, rights, and claims. The Portuguese misunderstandings about land use and rights are examined in detail, exploring the consequences for African historiography.

As long as people could be used as economic pawns, freedom was an ambiguous status. While legal recognition of property rights over land and goods expanded in the nineteenth century, the morality regarding ownership of human beings was challenged in courts, parliaments, and newspapers for centuries. Chapter 5 explores the experiences of freed people in a context of change related to property recognition and rights along with freed people’s access to property in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although semantics suggest otherwise, there was very little distinction between the experiences of enslaved or freed people in Angola. Accumulation of free and enslaved bodied, known as wealth in people, has been a fundamental framework for understanding West Central African societies’ understandings about wealth and accumulation. But ownership rights over people were contested within a context of juridical changes in all kinds of property rights in Angola. Coerced, unfree labor persisted, even as Portugal introduced gradual means to emancipate slaves in its possessions. Any efforts to regulate and end ownership rights over individuals had a public and a private sphere of debates, where slavers resisted the end of commodification while enslaved individuals rejected amelioration and gradual abolition projects.

This chapter examines the commodification of people during the nineteenth century. The records available in the colonial archive expose the extent of people’s commodification. The brutality of property claims over human beings is unambiguous in inventories, registers, bills of sale, and waybills, paper documents created to deny humanity and protect the interest of owners. These documents continue to reproduce the violence and legal and extra-legal exclusion that enslaved individuals experienced in the past by limiting their historical existence to records that categorized them solely as commodities. The records were created to facilitate control of property, and their survival discloses the commitment to register people’s exclusion and dispossession.

Chapter 3 focuses on the strengthening of the bureaucracy and written culture that, by the early nineteenth century, created an ersatz historical proof and solidified territorial and political claims. After two centuries of conquest, by the turn of the nineteenth century, new forms of official records, such as land registries, deeds, and inventories, and the expansion of surveys and reports led to an association between individual ownership, written registration, and property recognition. As in other colonial experiences, paper records represented authenticity and legitimation in the eyes of colonizers and also brought changes in the perceptions of governance. Ndombe, Kilengues, Kakondas, and Bienos embraced written evidence and paper power as providing proof of ownership. The existence of the paper created a new reality, that is, the idea that occupation and possession could be proven, that an individual was a landowner, a farmer, and a respectable resident of the colonial town. The establishment of written records and venues for petition such as courts allowed colonial subjects to make use of the colonial law and bureaucracy to strategically survive the new legal order and claim rights.

The history of wealth accumulation and dispossession in Angola has been intertwined with the consolidation of liberal notions of progress, private property rights, land enclosure, and civilization. This is not a history of progress, but an account of dismantling – dismantle of communal rights and values that ordered societies. West Central African societies did not move progressively from one type of wealth, in people, to private property. In fact, West Central African communities valued both: territory and kinship. Wealth in people cannot exist in isolation from land control. An alternative interpretation of the past is necessary, moving away from earlier arguments that placed West Central Africans as primitive or backward and reifying colonialism and land grabbing. This is an effort to problematize recent interpretations of the Angolan past that understood territorial occupation, population removals, and dispossession as inevitable. As it is clear in local archives, West Central Africans valued land since 1600 – perhaps even earlier.