Between Oceans and Continents: The Registers of Slave and Freed Africans of Portuguese Mozambique, 1854-1875

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, Rice University

In the nineteenth century, Mozambique, in southeast Africa, emerged as an important source of slaves for societies located as far apart as Cuba and Indonesia. As anti-slave trade forces suppressed the traffic along the coast of West Africa, slave traders sought for alternative sources of captives in previously underexplored regions. Mozambique emerged as an ideal place. Not only was it situated in a relatively remote region, far beyond the center of the suppression campaign, as it already counted with pre-existing commercial networks linking the interior to the coast. But who were these slaves? From where did they come? What happened to them? This paper discusses a database website made with newly recovered sources that throw light on these questions: the registers of slave and freed Africans from Portuguese Mozambique made between the 1850s and 1870s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 187. Surfacing History from Below: Race and the Digital Humanities