Politics, Commerce, and Colonization in Angola at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em História Moderna e dos Descobrimentos

This dissertation explores Commerce, politics, and colonization in Angola at the turn of the eighteenth century. The work will discuss these topics through three main chapters that are spatially divided into the Angolan hinterland, the coastal region, and the Atlantic through the Angolan perspective. Separating the work into distinct geographical and conceptual boundaries makes it possible to discern the interconnectivity as well as the interdependency of Angola as an aggregate of the three geographical areas and Portuguese colonial forces. Making these important connections provides the means through which the way that these colonial processes transformed can be identified. The first chapter focuses on politics and colonization in the Angolan hinterland. It discusses methods of colonization and introduces political and commercial actors that are relevant in following chapters. The second chapter discusses the Angolan commercial structure on the coast, and its inherent connection to the hinterland and politics in the territory. The first two chapters set the stage through introducing major themes and characters that permit the disquisition to reach the Atlantic sphere in the final chapter. Here, the Angolan slave trade will serve to evince the manner in which events that occurred in Angola and in Brazil mutually impacted each other, and as a result, the hinterland and coastal merchants. This will be done through discussing the ideologies of slavery and Atlantic History that allow a deeper understanding of the parameters through which the slave trade can be studied as well as how Angola was deeply affected by isolated events that produced processes of change. The overarching thesis that this dissertation intends to prove is that politics, commerce, and colonization in Angola were intrinsically connected through economic motives that incited a period of transformation at the turn of the eighteenth century.