Brazil received nearly half of all Africans forced across the Atlantic
Of roughly 12 million Africans shipped in bondage to the Americas, about 5.5 million were taken to Brazil, more than to any other country. Sugar, gold, diamonds and coffee were all built on their labour, and no other country in the Americas kept slavery legal for as long; it ended there only on 13 May 1888.
Portugal was in the African slave trade from 1441, decades before its explorers reached Brazil; scholars estimate up to 156,000 people were shipped from Africa to Iberia and the Atlantic islands by 1521. Pedro Álvares Cabral's expedition arrived in Brazil in 1500 and the first settlement followed in 1516. Colonists first turned to Indigenous labour, and bandeirantes, frontier raiders from many backgrounds, pushed inland capturing people, often raiding Jesuit missions. One expedition in 1629 under Antônio Raposo Tavares enslaved more than 60,000 Indigenous people.
Colonists justified this by pointing to slavery and cannibalism among some Indigenous groups before contact, claiming they were rescuing captives. Historians note that Portuguese enslavement operated on a far larger scale than anything that came before, and some clergy objected at the time: in a 1653 sermon in São Luís, the Jesuit Antônio Vieira called the forced capture of natives a sin dressed up with the pious word rescue.
From the 1570s African captives became the main workforce on sugar plantations. Indigenous workers died quickly from overwork and disease and knew the land well enough to escape, while many Africans had sugar-making experience. Conditions were brutal: the average enslaved African lived only to about twenty-three, still around four years longer than Indigenous captives. For the colony's first 250 years about 70 percent of all arrivals were enslaved.
Each new boom deepened the trade. Sugar dominated exports from 1600 to 1650; the discovery of gold and diamonds in 1690 drove further imports for the mines; cattle and food production kept demand high after mining declined; and about 1.7 million people were brought from Africa during the eighteenth century alone. The coffee boom of the 1830s expanded the trade again. The legacy of this system remains bound up with Brazil's continuing struggle against systemic racism.
Source: Slavery in Brazil
