Listen to this essay

Over the past century, historians of the United States have made increasing efforts to challenge the predominant 19th-century view that slavery in the US South was somewhat a benevolent institution. The old, idealised and paternalistic understanding of the history of slavery featured prominently in novels and motion pictures like Gone with the Wind (1939). Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, in his 1918 survey of American slavery, and other influential historians promoted this distortion too, claiming that slave owners in the US South treated their enslaved property with kindness, by providing them decent rations of food and good clothing, while encouraging the formation of stable family ties, education and Christianity.

In the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the historians W E B Du Bois and Carter G Woodson challenged this misrepresentation, stressing the profits made by US slave traders and owners, and underscoring the cruelty of bondage in the US. Later, the historians Frederic Bancroft and Kenneth M Stampp followed suit, noting the ubiquity of family separation and sexual violence, and the near-impossibility of emancipation. The misleading view of slavery as a benign institution didn’t survive the post-Second World War period, which brought racism into new disrepute. However, into the 1960s and beyond, some scholars continued to see slavery in Latin America, especially in Brazil, as less significant and milder than in the US. There were different reasons for this view, some deriving from the fact that the US was a Protestant country in a mostly Catholic hemisphere. Catholicism predominated in French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and the strong influence of the Catholic Church on Iberian legal codes and custom influenced the practice of slavery. In the French and Spanish colonies in the Americas, as well as in Brazil, the doctrines of Catholicism gave enslaved people some rights, including the right to marry and the ability to buy their freedom.

Enslaved people harvesting coffee, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (c1882). Courtesy Instituto Moreira Salles

Postwar US scholars who saw Latin American slavery as less severe than the US version drew heavily on the earlier work of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre and the US historian Frank Tannenbaum. Freyre’s book The Masters and the Slaves, originally published in 1933, was translated into English in 1946. Freyre went as far as to suggest an image of Brazil as a country virtually without racism, in contrast with the US. Over the past 50 years, however, historians like Florestan Fernandes and Abdias Nascimento have dismantled this 20th-century liberal fable of Brazil as a racial paradise. Due to the influence of Tannenbaum and Freyre’s work, however, a view of Brazilian slavery as comparatively benign, relative to the US, sometimes persists among educated people.

Academia in the US emphasises what is basically a Global North and Anglocentric perspective on the history of modern slavery. This global perspective has contributed to focusing on the US as the most important slave society in the Americas. In other ways, most ways, US slavery was not especially peculiar. Africans and their descendants were enslaved across the entire western hemisphere, including in present-day Chile, Canada and Bolivia. Most enslaved Africans were transported to Latin America. Historians estimate that Brazil alone imported approximately 4.8 million enslaved men, women and children, representing nearly half of the 10.5 million enslaved Africans who disembarked alive in the Americas between 1501 and 1866. These figures contrast with the estimated 388,000 enslaved Africans who disembarked in the US during the same period.

Scholars of slavery know about this huge disparity between the number of Africans transported to the Americas for slavery versus how many ended up in the US, but it is not popular or common knowledge. Since the 1960s, and still today, most university programs and departments studying the history of slavery are in the US. The largest academic book industry in slavery studies is also in the US. The size and strength of the North American university system has no rival. The global visibility of the US civil rights movement, in the aftermath of the Second World War, also contributed in major ways to the extraordinary strength and vitality of scholarly research into slavery.

The Black population of Latin America hasn’t enjoyed any of these powerful cultural and intellectual institutions producing their history. During the Cold War era, brutal military dictatorships supported by the US took over Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile. Under these regimes, anti-Black racism, in Brazil and other countries, couldn’t even be publicly denounced. No appeal to a right to freedom of speech existed, and Black activists who spoke out would likely go to prison.

Brazil imported 12 times more enslaved people than the US. By the mid-19th century, the US had 2.5 times more

Of course, especially in the second half of the 20th century, the soft power of the US empire brought its movies and television to the rest of the people of the Americas. Novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) in their 1977 film and television adaptations made a very big impact around the world, including in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.

Another way in which US slavery was unusual was in the nature of population increase. Brazil imported approximately 4.8 million enslaved Africans. That’s more than 12 times the 388,000 enslaved men, women and children who disembarked from Africa alive in the region of the present-day US (some enslaved Africans also entered North America through the Caribbean). Yet in 1872, Brazil’s enslaved population was composed of approximately 1.5 million individuals, whereas even 12 years earlier, in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, there were close to 4 million bondspeople in the US. How is it that Brazil imported so many more enslaved people than the US, yet by the mid-19th century the US had 2.5 times more?

Part of the answer is that neither in the US, nor in Brazil, was slavery benign. We don’t have clear figures about slave mortality in Brazil, but as the sugar boom started in the 17th century, it’s not an exaggeration to state that enslaved people, mainly men, who worked in the northeast sugar estates rarely survived longer than seven or eight years. In Brazil, very high mortality rates and low birth rates were due in part to the gender imbalance. More male Africans were imported than females, at approximately a rate of two men to one woman. As a result, the Portuguese simply worked people to death and then continuously imported new enslaved Africans. In the US, in contrast, especially in the 19th century, the wombs of enslaved women produced the new generations of bondspeople: in other words, the population of the enslaved experienced natural growth.

Six years ago, another influential work appeared portraying the US as the centre of slavery in the Americas. The year 2019 marked the 400th anniversary of 1619, when the first documented enslaved Africans landed in the British colony of Virginia. For many decades, African Americans have embraced the year 1619 as a site of memory, in the sense established by the French historian Pierre Nora. For him, sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) exist because over time they have come to uphold a significant fragment of the past for a given community. In this way, the year 1619 came to symbolise the beginning of slavery in the US, a site of memory of slavery.

In 2019, at its 400th anniversary, 1619 received new visibility in the media, following ‘The 1619 Project’. Published in The New York Times Magazine, the project, led by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, consisted of a series of essays authored by US scholars, writers and artists focusing on the present-day legacies of slavery in the US. As a result, more than before, many people started associating the year 1619 with the rise of slavery in the Americas.

In 1521, a century before 1619, enslaved people led a rebellion on a sugar estate on........

© Aeon