Large 8vo, (220 x 140 mm), 15 pp., small scallop-shell blindstamp in upper outer margins of title page and p. 9., slightly nicked in lower blank margin of first 3 leaves. Early plain green wrappers, partly unopened. In very good condition.

Angola was at the centre of the global slave trade, and the institution of enslaving Africans, for almost 400 years. Portugal established a regular presence there from the late 15th century and founded their first colony in Angola, at Luanda, in 1576. From there, the Portuguese created an elaborate network, in cooperation with accommodating indigenous nations, to capture unfortunate Angolans and send them to the New World. Along with the Gold Coast (Ghana), Angola was the largest single source of African slaves to the Americas, supplying a large percentage of the captive workforce in places such as Brazil and Cuba, while through intermediaries, Angolan slaves ended up in places everywhere from Virginia to Chile.

Portugal and international syndicates of slave traders and investors earned vast fortunes from this ignoble commerce for many generations. Yet, the slave trade horribly disfigured Angola’s indigenous societies, as well as hampering the Portuguese colonial development of the country. Slavery was fuel for the constant wars between the indigenous nations in the interior, and the export of many thousands of the country’s youngest and fittest people robbed it of vital human capital. Moreover, the nature of the trade, whereupon the Portuguese remained relatively idle in their coastal enclaves, waiting for indigenous traders to bring them their human commodities, made them ‘lazy’, such that they did little to develop the immense agrarian and mining potential of Angola.

Essentially, by the end of the 18th century, the Portuguese bases in Angola were nothing more than slave entrepôts, with the interior war-torn and chaotic.

In 1807, Britain enforced a global ban on the international slave trade, with an emphasis upon shutting down the Transatlantic commerce. This threatened to destroy Angola’s only major industry, posing an existential threat to Portugal’s presence in Africa. In 1817, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, during which Britain helped to liberate Portugal from French occupation, under intense pressure, Lisbon signed a treaty with London, agreeing to ban the Transatlantic slave trade. However, for years thereafter, slave traders continued to export slaves from Angola with the local authorities’ tacit consent, transferring their human cargos to places such as Rio de Janeiro and Havana. This usually occurred without interference, as Britain, Portugal’s oldest ally, was hesitant to authorize its Royal Navy to intercept slavers flying the Portuguese flag. In the 1820s and ’30s, Portuguese Africa (led by Angola) was the largest source of slaves sent to the Americas.

During the 1830s, the Portuguese Empire was engaged in a fierce internal debate over the future of the Transatlantic slave trade, with powerful forces representing both sides. Many prominent liberals were ardent abolitionists (not only in favour of banning the slave trade but slavery itself). Their side was led for decades by the military hero and colonial expert Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, 1st Marquis de Sá da Bandeira (1795 - 1876), who would serve five terms as Prime Minister, and was otherwise often a senior member of the cabinet.

Countering Sá da Bandeira’s abolitionists was the ‘colonial lobby’, consisting of grandees in Portuguese Africa, as well as members of the maritime trading communities in Metropolitan Portugal who depended either directly or indirectly upon the Transatlantic slave trade.

Both sides were extremely powerful and determined, and by the late 1830s they seemed to have reached stalemate, as Sá da Bandeira was able to implement only modest limitations upon the slave trade, while major abolitionist moves were successfully checked by the colonial lobby.

It took robust British intervention to kill off Portuguese involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade. Britain had lost patience with its ally’s foot-dragging, and it enacted the ‘Palmerston Act’ (August 24, 1839), which authorized the Royal Navy to board suspected Portuguese slaving vessels, and to seize them for trial if evidence of slaving was found.

The Palmerston Act eventually compelled Portugal to sign a new anti-slave trade treaty with Britain on 3rd July 1842, whereby Lisbon promised to seriously come down hard on the trade. This time, Portugal acted, and while black-market trading continued, the slavers often found their endeavours to be prohibitively expensive and dangerous. The trade from Portuguese Africa to the Americas dramatically declined, becoming only a trickle by the late 1840s. However, slavery itself remained legal within Portuguese Africa.

The matter of the immediate vs. phased abolition of slavery sparked another great debate across the Portuguese world, with the ‘usual suspects’ (Sá da Bandeira’s Liberals vs. the colonial lobby) lined up on both sides. Importantly, while the abolitionists had the moral momentum on their side, the ‘gradualists’ had some persuasive arguments, as the abrupt cessation of slavery in places such as Angola posed a very real chance of collapsing their economies.

Balsemão states that “I have been in Africa – Cabo Verde and Angola for close to thirteen years and have never had trouble finding people to serve me for money (p. 9). He recalls that, in 1858, when he made a tour of Barra do Bengo and Calumbo (in the interior near Luanda), “I needed porters... I hired them freely, I got them. I came and went without trouble" – the porters did not need to be enslaved.

He continues, “As expected”, the local “African population grew rapidly and considerably”, peacefully thriving, while harvesting bumper crops. Discrediting the “gibberish that tradition attributes to Sambo”, the former slaves willingly took advantage of the education programmes that they were offered by New Englander volunteers and learned valuable vocational and language skills. They also transformed their former squalid slave huts into well-appointed cabins with newly made furniture.

Balsemão declares that freedom “awakened in the soul the noblest feelings, such as love of country, duty and justice”, and “these are the salutary results of the freedom given to” the Port Royal slaves; And such will, be the ones that will be harvested with the freedom given to the slaves of Angola, Africans like them, like them the children of the same land: fed with the same milk, circulating in their veins the same blood”.

“It is therefore necessary to give freedom to the slaves of this province: not, it is understood, absolute and limitless freedom, but polite freedom, the freedom of culture and civilized nations”, while “for those who abuse it there is the law...” (p. 14).

Sadly, ultimately the colonial lobby won this debate. The royal commission decided, largely on economic grounds, that slavery should be gradually phased out over a ten-year-long transitional period, from 1869 to 1879. Making matters worse, Bettencourt’s recommendations were not followed, as the cash-strapped Portuguese regime cut corners and did little to train or care for the outgoing slaves, while scarcely ever policing how masters treated their captives. In many cases, slavery continued in Angola after 1869 exactly as it had before.

While slavery was formally abolished in 1879, as was the case in U.S. Deep South, this was a false dawn, as the colonial lobby ensured that in Angola there were legal systems of corvée labour, that were often slavery in all but name. Severe economic and political turmoil in Portugal beginning in the 1880s, ensured that Liberal anti-slavery forces were distracted and unable to check the conservative elements in the colonies as they had done previously. While some formerly enslaved Angolans gained true freedom, most did not. The decision to follow neither Balsemão or Bettencourt’s recommendations ensured that black Angolans generally remained politically disenfranchised and poor, while Angola’s economy was far less productive than it might otherwise have been. This led to the unrest that eventually caused the unravelling of the Portuguese colonial regime.

Works printed in Angola during the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s are extremely rare on the market. The present work is very rare. It would only have been issued in a small print run, while the survival rate of works published in 19th century Sub-Saharan Africa is low.

We can trace 5 institutional examples, held by the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal; Instituto Investigação Científica e Tropical (Lisbon); Yale University Library; New York Public Library; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Fonseca, Aditamentos p. 114: without imprint or collation; Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal: S.C. 12945//11 P.; Instituto Investigação Científica e Tropical: AHULR=338; Yale University Library: 2018 1071; New York Public Library: Sc Rare D 16-18 (Lapidus Collection); Wisconsin-Madison: HT1419 A5 B35 1867; OCLC: 506514361.