ABSTRACT

Together, Portugal and Brazil were the second biggest players in the transatlantic slave trade. However, we still know little about the profits generated by the slave trade and by the activities carried out by slaves within the Portuguese Empire – in particular in the Atlantic world. In other words, who were the various groups benefiting from those profits and where was the capital obtained invested and/or reinvested? In this article, we present preliminary estimates of gross profits generated by the Portuguese Brazilian participation in this business and discuss the methodological challenges faced to calculate the net profits of Portuguese–Brazilian participation in the slave trade as well as in assessing the weight of slave-based produce in the economies of Portugal, and Brazil. The first part of our study relies mainly on the data available in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, evidence gathered from several Portuguese archives, and the slave prices’ series built by David Richardson and David Eltis et al for West and West Central Africa and the Brazilian slave prices series built by Laird Bergad. The second part will be based on the vast body of literature and source materials available in Portuguese, English and other languages on the topic.

摘要

葡萄牙和巴西加在一起是跨大西洋奴隶贸易的第二大参与者。但是，我们仍然对奴隶贸易和奴隶在葡萄牙帝国境内，特别是在大西洋世界中的奴隶所从事的活动所产生的利润知之甚少。换句话说，各个群体谁从这些利润中受益，获得的资本在哪里进行了投资和/或再投资？在本文中，我们介绍了葡萄牙巴西人参与这项业务所产生的毛利的初步估计，并讨论了计算葡萄牙－巴西人参与奴隶贸易的净利润以及评估奴隶制的权重所面临的方法挑战。以葡萄牙和巴西的经济为基础。等人（针对中西部非洲和中西部非洲）以及Laird Bergad建立的巴西奴隶价格系列。第二部分将基于该主题的大量文献和以葡萄牙语，英语和其他语言提供的原始资料为基础。