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Linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans: Asian textiles, Spanish silver, global capital, and the financing of the Portuguese–Brazilian slave trade (c.1760–1808)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2020

J. Bohorquez
J. Bohorquez*
Affiliation:
Instituto Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Professor Aníbal Bettencourt 9, 1600-189 Lisbon, Portugal
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: jesus.bohorquez@ics.ulisboa.pt
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Abstract

This article aims to analyse some of the multilateral flows of capital that contributed to weaving a Global South during the second half of the eighteenth century. It specifically revisits the functioning and financing of the Portuguese slave trade from a global perspective, and offers insights for assessing older frameworks that explain it, in either triangular or bilateral terms. The article argues that the Portuguese slave traffic should be liberated from the South Atlantic borders to which it has been confined. In so doing, it offers an Atlantic history in a global perspective, disclosing the connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Putting the financing of the slave trade into a larger global perspective helps to more accurately explain how it actually operated in terms of the organization of trade. When the financial and institutional foundations of Asian and African trade are analysed together, it becomes evident that they were part of larger networks and capital flows, both westwards and eastwards, which were not just framed imperially or locally.

Keywords

Atlantic historyBrazilcapitalPortuguese tradeslave trade

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Type
Articles
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Journal of Global History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 19 - 38
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© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

†

I wrote an initial version of this article while I was a fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I would specially like to thank Prof. Sven Beckert and Prof. Charles Meier. The Journal’s editors made meaningful suggestions; I particularly thank Prof. William Gervase Clarence-Smith. Some of the ideas presented here were discussed in Boston, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Bochum, and Paris. I would particularly like to thank Professors Roquinaldo Ferreira, Diogo Ramada Curto, Claude Markovits, Carlos Gabriel Guimarães, Max Menz, Rafael Marquese, and Carlos Eduardo Valencia. I have been able to undertake this research thanks to financial support from the Harvard and Cambridge Joint Center for History and Economics History Project, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Slicher Van Bath de Jong Foundation, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the European University Institute, and the Fundação para Ciência e Tecnologia de Portugal.

References

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