O Atlântico sul em perspectiva global. Fundamentos institucionais e financeiros do tráfico de escravos do Rio de Janeiro durante a Era das revoluções

This paper analyses Rio de Janeiro’s slave trade during the turn of the nineteenth-century. It resorts to new institutional economics in order to disclose the institutional foundations that underpinned these commercial exchanges. It argues that the slave traffic was involved into much more complex sets of inter-dependencies that do not necessarily match neither the triangular nor the bipolar frames. Therefore, a case is made for a global approach as a third way to examine the slave trade. Indian and Atlantic Oceans get connected through the analyses of diverse mercantile instruments that supported  the financing of Indo-Portuguese trade as well as the purchase of Indian textiles, which were essential commodities for the slave traffic to operate. Finally, patterns of slave shipments from African to Rio de Janeiro are analyzed through a particular mercantile institution called consignment, casting doubt on the accuracy of some conclusions previously reached concerning export patterns.