Istwa Nou

Rio de Janeiro became the leading outfitting centre in the Americas for slaving voyages, and its peak came late, in the nineteenth century, while the trade elsewhere was being shut down. The ships were owned, financed and fitted out by merchants living in Rio. The goods used to buy captives on the African coast were produced in Brazil or imported from Asia rather than bought in Europe, so the Luso-Brazilian system ran on its own resources at both ends of the voyage. By the early eighteen hundreds Rio was the single largest port of entry for enslaved Africans in the whole history of the transatlantic trade, taking more people than Kingston, Havana, Charleston or any port in the Caribbean. Haiti had been independent since 1804 and had abolished slavery outright. During the same decades the largest slave market ever assembled in the Americas was working a few thousand miles to the south, and the two facts belong on one timeline.