On the margins of the Empire, inside the chiefdoms

Commercial strategies of "sertanejos" and Central Africans in the Central Highlands of Angola (1840s to 1860s)

Abstract

During the period between the XVI^th and the XIX^th centuries, the region currently called Angola was the main origin of the population of enslaved people carried to America. With the legal prohibition of the Atlantic Slave Trade by the Portuguese in 1836, there were profound social transformations in the interior of the continent, in the so-called Atlantic Zone. This paper will analyze some of those political, economic and social changes using information from the daily reports of a merchant who lived in the hinterland – a “sertanejo” – that tried to adapt to these new contexts, recruiting long-distance caravans to transport colonial goods, mainly ivory and wax, from hundreds of kilometers to the coast. So, we will point out several strategies of the various agents involved in this commercial network, whose center was the Central-African kingdom of Viye.