Istwa Nou

By the close of the sixteenth century Brazil was the leading sugar producer in the world, and its three great ports were the busiest arrival points for Africans anywhere in the Americas. Recife, Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro received ships direct from the African coast. They also worked as transfer stations. Gold and diamonds were found in the interior in the eighteenth century, and people landed on the coast were marched inland to the mining districts of Minas Gerais and Goias. After 1760 the northern ports of Para and Maranhao began drawing slavers of their own, because the mills of Europe wanted cotton and the Amazon fringe could grow it. Add the columns and more than 2.5 million people had been landed in Brazil before the nineteenth century began. That is well beyond anything Saint-Domingue absorbed across its entire existence, and Brazil was nowhere near finished. The largest destination of the Atlantic slave trade is the one that gets the least attention in accounts written in English.