This book explores the perspective of individuals, families and groups of interest in their daily strive to survive an European pursuit of empire.

Peoples living on the shores of the South Atlantic during the first sixty years of the seventeenth century were confronted with challenges imposed by colonial occupation, disputes between empires and continuous warfare. While the future of the Dutch and Portuguese empires was being decided with unparalleled violence, common people faced daily challenges to survive institutional and political interests beyond their control. This book takes the perspective of individuals, families and groups of interest in their daily strive to survive a European pursuit of empire. Contributors are: Cátia Antunes, Francisco Bethencourt, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, José Manuel Santos-Pérez, Marco António Nunes da Silva, Bruno Romero Ferreira Miranda, Anne B. McGinness, Thiago Nascimento Krause, Christopher Ebert, and Amélia Polónia.

Argues that Dutch Brazil is integral to Atlantic history and made an impact well beyond the colonial and national narratives in the Netherlands and Brazil.

By looking at Dutch and Portuguese systems of settlement and trade in Western Africa, this book sheds new light on the formation of Dutch and Portuguese imperial frames, forms of commercial organisation and their role on the seventeenth-century-Atlantic.

Macro-level study of the South Atlantic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrating how Brazil’s emergence was built on the longest and most intense slave trade of the modern era. The seventeenth-century missionary and diplomat Father Antônio Vieira once observed that Brazil was nourished, animated, sustained, served, and conserved by the “sad blood” of the “black and unfortunate souls” imported from Angola. In The Trade in the Living, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro demonstrates how the African slave trade was an essential element in the South Atlantic and in the ongoing cohesion of Portuguese America, while at the same time the concrete interests of Brazilian colonists, dependent on Angolan slaves, were often violently asserted in Africa, to ensure men and commodities continued to move back and forth across the Atlantic. In exposing this intricate and complementary relationship between two non-European continents, de Alencastro has fashioned a new and challenging examination of colonial Brazil, one that moves beyond its relationship with Portugal to discover a darker, hidden history.

In 1624 the Dutch West India Company established the colony of Brazil. Only thirty years later, the Dutch Republic handed over the colony to Portugal, never to return to the South Atlantic. Because Dutch Brazil was the first sustained Protestant colony in Iberian America, the events there became major news in early modern Europe and shaped a lively print culture. In Amsterdam's Atlantic, historian Michiel van Groesen shows how the rise and tumultuous fall of Dutch Brazil marked the emergence of a "public Atlantic" centered around Holland's capital city. Amsterdam served as Europe's main hub for news from the Atlantic world, and breaking reports out of Brazil generated great excitement in the city, which reverberated throughout the continent. Initially, the flow of information was successfully managed by the directors of the West India Company. However, when Portuguese sugar planters revolted against the Dutch regime, and tales of corruption among leading administrators in Brazil emerged, they lost their hold on the media landscape, and reports traveled more freely. Fueled by the powerful local print media, popular discussions about Brazil became so bitter that the Amsterdam authorities ultimately withdrew their support for the colony. The self-inflicted demise of Dutch Brazil has been regarded as an anomaly during an otherwise remarkably liberal period in Dutch history, and consequently generations of historians have neglected its significance. Amsterdam's Atlantic puts Dutch Brazil back on the front pages and argues that the way the Amsterdam media constructed Atlantic events was a key element in the transformation of public opinion in Europe.

The financial management of Brazil was the task of the provedor-mor da fazenda, the Portuguese crown's chief fiscal official in the colony. He was responsible for the collection of crown income and ensuring the governing infrastructure was adequately financed. This study based on unedited archival sources and other contemporary documents will examine in detail the tenures of the provedor-mor da fazenda of Brazil through the seventeenth century. Demonstrating that these crown officials were extremely skillful in managing the colony under difficult circumstance such as the threat of takeover by the Dutch further emphasizes the crucial role they played. Portugal's South Atlantic empire predated all other plantation economies in the Atlantic and its establishment is the true creation of the Atlantic World.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.