Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian returnee movement: Demographics, life stories and the question of slavery

Abstract

This paper examines Brazil's century return to Africa movement from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, identifying three main stages. The largest single wave of voyages came after an 1835 slave uprising in the province of Bahia, when around 200 freed Africans were deported and roughly a thousand others left voluntarily, fleeing anti-African legislation. In the 1840s, smaller numbers of Africans also traveled to the continent of their birth, many as employees on slave vessels. A new phase of migrations came after 1850, with the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil and the British seizure of Lagos a year later. Previous estimates of the volume of travelers are examined in combination with demographic data on passport recipients, in order to frame micro-historical analysis of individual travelers. In the first and third stages, Africans often traveled with their households, comprising not only blood kin but also their slaves and former slaves, while in the second phase many of those who left for Africa were men travelling alone who later returned to Brazil. The resulting portrait of changes over time offers insights into the varying reasons that led freed Africans to leave Brazil, also raising questions about the continued presence of the institution of slavery in their lives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.