Istwa Nou

More than 1.5 million enslaved Africans were put ashore at Rio de Janeiro, making it the largest single point of arrival in the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade. Over 80 percent came from West Central Africa, and the remainder arrived from southeast Africa and the Bight of Benin. The demand came from the interior. Mining had opened the Brazilian highlands in the previous century, and coffee then spread across the hills behind the city, an export crop that swallowed labour as fast as ships could supply it. The peak of the traffic fell in the first half of the nineteenth century, after Britain had abolished its own trade and was policing the ocean. Brazil banned the trade in 1831 under British pressure, and Rio went on receiving people anyway through an illegal traffic organised out of the same counting houses, with the same ships and the same partners on the African coast. Prohibition altered the paperwork. The volume kept climbing.