This chapter investigates the reverberations of the Oporto liberal revolution and Brazilian independence on the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa. Angola was the largest supplier of enslaved labor for recently independent Brazil, yet the ties between the two regions stretched well beyond the transatlantic slave trade. A cultural and social continuum connected the South Atlantic World, and the chapter argues that such ties acquired a political dimension in the wake of the Oporto revolution and Brazil’s secession from Portugal. To trace how Angola’s coastal elites responded to the end of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, the chapter reconstructs the trajectory of a single individual, the Luanda born Domingos Pereira Diniz, who became the president of the Benguela Junta, a governmental body which endorsed a petition in which Benguela’s elite requested the right to become an overseas province of independent Brazil.

This chapter challenges received wisdom that focuses solely on politics to understand the revolutionary nature of independence in Latin America. It revisits Latin America’s independence processes by investigating the multiple forms of coerced labor regimes and forced migrations that emerged throughout the continent after the breakdown of colonialism. The region is a crucial site for exploring how in the nineteenth century liberal legal discourses aimed at erasing categories of social difference continued to reproduce inequality based on multiple iterations of unfree labor. In addition to placing Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish American mainland in the same frame, the chapter connects African, Chinese, and indigenous peoples’ histories. Seeking to shed new light on how independence impacted labor regimes, we engage with scholarship that argues for the employment of a transregional lens in the study of global labor regimes during the nineteenth century. A transregional approach to labor regimes reveals new dimensions to mechanisms of inequality and oppression that have long gripped the continent, while also connecting it to trends reshaping labor regimes on a global scale.

This chapter analyses Portuguese attempts to strengthen colonial ties with Angola by promoting agricultural activities in its African colony between the 1830s and 1860s. Recently, Seymour Drescher has argued that the abolition of the slave trade was not part of British imperialist aspirations towards Africa and that the end of the slave trade did not lay the groundwork for colonial rule over Africa. While this statement might be true in the case of the British, it did not apply to another colonial power with long ties to Africa: Portugal. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as the movement to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade gained strength throughout the Atlantic, Portugal sought to reframe its colonial links to Angola by promoting policies aimed at shifting its economy away from the slave trade and toward legal activities such as market-oriented agriculture.

The relationship between the end of the slave trade and Portuguese colonial plans for Africa has long been debated by scholars. In the 1960s, R.J. Hammond argued that Portuguese colonialism was born out of a reflexive ideological attachment to Africa and devoid of economic interest. This stance was challenged by the Portuguese historian Valentim Alexandre, who argued that despite its failure, early Portuguese colonialism was firmly rooted in Portuguese economic interests. Recently, Alexandre's view has been rejected by João Pedro Marques, who contends that that Portugal paid little attention to its African colonies before the mid-nineteenth century.