Slavery, Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

Kirsten Schultz

doi:10.1080/0144039X.2012.709041

Slavery, Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

Kirsten Schultz

Department of History

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This article examines a defense of the slave trade mounted in the 1790s by the Luso-Brazilian Bishop Azeredo Coutinho. While Azeredo's defense has been interpreted as a function of his slave-owning family's interest, this article provides a broader analysis of Azeredo's writings on the slave trade and the Portuguese empire within the contexts of eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian intellectual culture and transatlantic debates about empire, commerce and historical transformation. His writing on the imperial economy and the slave trade included both appeals to an eighteenth-century ideal of civilization as a process predicated upon the universality of humanity as well as defense of empire as the rational, just and necessary exploitation of the barbarous by the civilized.

Original language	American English
Pages (from-to)	98-117
Journal	Slavery Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume	34
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2012.709041
State	Published - 2013

Keywords

slavery
Bishop Azeredo Coutinho
slave trade
Portugal
Portuguese empire

Disciplines

History
Political History
International and Area Studies
Inequality and Stratification

Access to Document

10.1080/0144039X.2012.709041License: Unspecified

Cite this

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abstract = " This article examines a defense of the slave trade mounted in the 1790s by the Luso-Brazilian Bishop Azeredo Coutinho. While Azeredo's defense has been interpreted as a function of his slave-owning family's interest, this article provides a broader analysis of Azeredo's writings on the slave trade and the Portuguese empire within the contexts of eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian intellectual culture and transatlantic debates about empire, commerce and historical transformation. His writing on the imperial economy and the slave trade included both appeals to an eighteenth-century ideal of civilization as a process predicated upon the universality of humanity as well as defense of empire as the rational, just and necessary exploitation of the barbarous by the civilized.",

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note = "Previous versions of this article were presented at the conference 'The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World', The Institute of European Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 2008, and the Atlantic World Workshop, Department of History, New York University, 2009. I thank all those who offered comments and suggestions.",

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Slavery, Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

Keywords

Disciplines

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