Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830

by Joseph C. Miller

This acclaimed history of Portuguese and Brazilian slaving in the southern Atlantic is now available in paperback.
    With extraordinary skill, Joseph C. Miller explores the complex relationships among the separate economies of Africa, Europe, and the South Atlantic that collectively supported the slave trade. He places the grim history of the trade itself within the context of the rise of merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. Throughout, Miller illuminates the experiences of the slaves themselves, reconstructing what can be known of their sufferings at the hands of their buyers and sellers.

Genres: History, Angola, Africa, Nonfiction, Portugal

796 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr., Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He was editor of the Journal of African History from 1990 to 1996.

Reviews

[John Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but very good. Foundational for historians of West Central Africa and its links with the slave trade. He was a very generous scholar by all accounts.

[Mwanafunzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly detailed study of the slave trade that operated between Angola and Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Miller tackles numerous themes, including Portuguese imperialism, the effects of the trade on African societies, the nature of trans-oceanic commerce, and the Brazilian plantation system. Remarkably, Miller shows that the trade between Angola and Brazil was often not very profitable to its organizers, but the allure of wealth never failed to draw in ruthless traders. Portuguese and Brazilian traders took on considerable economic risk and were often marginal to the overall trans-Atlantic network. But Miller notes that the sheer volume of captives allowed the traders to essentially build a bridge across the South Atlantic that could offset massive losses by way of its reproducibility. The result for the enslaved was a truly horrific system that treated humans purely as commodities. Miller shows that Portuguese and Brazilian traders ultimately sidelined local African trade partners by enlisting the support of the Portuguese crown and by controlling the oceanic network. These Euro-American merchants operated on complex credit networks. In Angola, the situation was brutal. Any hope of rising to political prominence rested on funneling persons and goods to Euro-American trade partners. The demographic consequences in Central Africa were on the order of several millions of people lost.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intricate and internally consistent explanation of the development and effects of the slave trade in Angola; in fact, the explanation is so neat that one begins to doubt whether it could possibly be true. For instance, Miller discusses African, Luso-African, expatriate, and Brazilian merchants in separate chapters, assigning a different set of motivations, disadvantages, and spheres of operations to each group (chapters 6-10). It is difficult to believe that these categories were in fact so distinct, or that the activities of individual members of each group corresponded closely to the paradigm Miller lays out. The book reminded me of Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, which posited a similarly compelling explanation of American slavery that seemed more like a structure imposed on the facts rather than one that arose from them.

Nevertheless valuable, insightful, and a cornerstone of the field of West African history.

[AskHistorians]

Dealing exclusively with the Congolese and Angolan Portuguese lead slave trades in the Atlantic this Miller goes into great detail into how slaves were procured in the interior and transported to the coasts and eventually to the Americas. Miller is particularly good at teasing out the intricicies of African slave trade based states and how the institution of slavery became a full blown enterprise for wealth creation in Central Africa.