What question did this study set out to answer?

The study aims to highlight the often-overlooked role of the Portuguese in the transatlantic slave trade and the South Atlantic's history.

June 4, 2026Open Access

The Roots of Portuguese Domination over the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Key Points

The study aims to highlight the often-overlooked role of the Portuguese in the transatlantic slave trade and the South Atlantic's history.
Literature review of existing historical analysis on the Atlantic World and the transatlantic slave trade.
Comparison of scholarly focus between North and South Atlantic slave trade research.
Examination of primary sources related to Portuguese oceanic voyages and slave trading practices.
Identifies that Rio de Janeiro and Bahia sent more slave ships to Africa than major ports in northern Europe.
Argues that the narrative of the transatlantic slave trade is heavily skewed towards North Atlantic perspectives.
Emphasizes the establishment of Portuguese oceanic knowledge and connections with African peoples, which facilitated their dominance.

Abstract

The history of the Atlantic World and of the transatlantic slave trade, especially, has for too long focused on the commerce conducted north of the equator.The slave colonies of the Caribbean and the emergence of the US still dominate the historiography of not just slavery and the slave trade, but the demographic and political history of the Americas.In the last decade, scholarly contributions to the history of the South Atlantic have begun to redress this situation, but even a cursory examination of the titles in the annual survey of the literature in the journal, Slavery and Abolition, indicates that the imbalance is still pronounced.Terms such as the "Middle Passage" predominate, even though, given the out and back nature of the massive trade to Brazil, most of it under the Portuguese flag, a "middle passage" simply did not exist.Scholars still fail to recognize that Rio de Janeiro and Bahia de Todos os Santos (now Salvador) and quite possibly Pernambuco (now Recife), each dispatched more vessels to Africa to obtain slaves than did any of the ports of Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Nantes that still predominate in the extensive English, Dutch, and French language scholarship on this subject.Scholars of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean refer to the "tyranny of the Atlantic World" to explain the imbalance of research funding dedicated to slave trading in the two oceans, when an equally drastic imbalance is one within the Atlantic-that between the still predominant North and the South Atlantic.Patricia Seed's new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade (2026), is ostensibly about a slave trading system anchored in Western Europe.Her argument about the foundational role of the Portuguese in not just establishing a transatlantic slave trade but in opening up the oceans of the world to European voyagers makes for a compelling read.It establishes the Portuguese creation of a body of oceanic knowledge and links with African peoples that other maritime nations were never quite able to match.While the broad outlines of the early Portuguese transoceanic ventures will be familiar to most readers, Seed's new book combines a total familiarity with the primary sources with

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