Slave resistance and the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850

TL;DR

The paper argues that slave resistance, especially the memory of the 1835 Malê Revolt and subsequent revolts/conspiracies, was a key variable pushing Brazilian imperial ministers to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1850. It positions this against an “Enlightenment School” that credits statesmanship and British pressure while discounting subaltern resistance.

Key findings

• The Revolt of the Malês began on January 25, 1835, in Salvador, Bahia: an estimated 600 African slaves and freedmen fought a larger force estimated at 1,500; at least 70 rebels died, perhaps double that were wounded, and 9 of those putting down the uprising died. Of 292 arrested rebels (176 slaves, 112 freedpersons, 4 unknown status), 73% were Nagô, though Nagô were 30% of Salvador’s 22,000 Africans; perhaps one fifth (4,400) of Salvador’s African population in 1835 were Muslim.
• Despite the revolt, disembarkations continued at a massive scale: traffickers landed an estimated 718,000 African slaves on Brazilian coasts from November 7, 1831, until suppression in 1851. The largest number of enslaved Africans to disembark in Brazil or any other region of the Americas occurred in 1848; the peak two years were 1848–1849 and the peak triennium was 1847–1849.
• The paper cites later security scares: an 1848 Pelotas conspiracy estimated at 1,500 slaves from six estates, with 200 muskets and 200 carbines found, 300 arrested, and ten dying from beatings; an 1849 Espírito Santo revolt beginning with 30 or more armed slaves and growing to 300; and an 1847 police list of 2,508 African freedpersons in Salvador (993 male, 1,515 female), making up 4.6% of the city’s estimated 54,330 inhabitants.
• The paper concludes that elite and popular insecurity, fear of Muslim religion, distrust of African freedpersons, and slave revolts/conspiracies forced representatives to seek a permanent halt to the slave trade, with Eusébio de Queiroz later describing events in Campos, Espírito Santo, Valença, and Vassouras as producing a “salutary” terror that helped shift opinion against the traffic.

Methods

• Design: historical essay and interpretive synthesis comparing the “Enlightenment School” and “Subaltern School” on the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850.
• Data: Brazilian archival documents, British Foreign Office Records (FO 13 and 84), police and provincial reports, speeches in the Senate, newspapers, and secondary historical literature; the author states he reviewed several hundred documents from 1835 to 1851.
• Analysis: qualitative close reading of official, consular, police, and journalistic sources to trace how slave resistance and fears of insurrection shaped political decisions leading to the Eusébio de Queiroz Law.

Limitations

• The paper states that “sure answers” are hard to come by when measuring the extent of the threat posed by slave importations and how much fear of slave resistance contributed to imperial ministers’ decisions in 1850.
• Evident from the text: the argument relies heavily on qualitative official, police, consular, and elite sources, so subaltern perspectives are often mediated through authorities; the paper does not present a systematic quantitative causal test of slave resistance versus British pressure or statesmanship.