The Making of a Slave-Trading Entrepôt: Rio de Janeiro in the Economic Spaces of Mining, 1565-1763

Abstract

This work explores the making of Rio de Janeiro as a key supplier of enslaved Africans to the silver and gold mining areas of Latin America over the early modern period. The city became a critical component of the South Atlantic system during the long seventeenth century, supplying captives to Spanish America in exchange for Peruvian silver. In the following century, it became an essential part of the Brazilian gold boom that radically transformed Portuguese America. The article discusses the role of coerced Amerindian and African labor in the creation of the basic city structures that allowed for the reproduction of those connections to mining zones and reflects on the broader meanings of this story, framing the specific history of Rio de Janeiro within the broader context of a capitalist world economy.