Documenting, monetising and taxing Brazilian slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Although Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas, knowledge of the accounting and taxation of slave-related transactions in Brazil is under-developed. We explore Portuguese-language documents showing how accounting and taxation were implicated in maintaining slavery in Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study presents examples of key documents involving slaves (such as inventory lists, rental agreements, insurance policies, and receipts) and explains how slave-related transactions were recorded and taxed. We enable important comparisons to be drawn with the accounting and taxation of slaves in the USA and British West Indies.

60,000 years of interactions between Central and Eastern Africa documented by major African mitochondrial haplogroup L2

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup L2 originated in Western Africa but is nowadays spread across the entire continent. L2 movements were previously postulated to be related to the Bantu expansion, but L2 expansions eastwards probably occurred much earlier. By reconstructing the phylogeny of L2 (44 new complete sequences) we provide insights on the complex net of within-African migrations in the last 60 thousand years (ka). Results show that lineages in Southern Africa cluster with Western/Central African lineages at a recent time scale, whereas, eastern lineages seem to be substantially more ancient. Three moments of expansion from a Central African source are associated to L2: (1) one migration at 70-50 ka into Eastern or Southern Africa, (2) postglacial movements (15-10 ka) into Eastern Africa; and (3) the southward Bantu Expansion in the last 5 ka. The complementary population and L0a phylogeography analyses indicate no strong evidence of mtDNA gene flow between eastern and southern populations during the later movement, suggesting low admixture between Eastern African populations and the Bantu migrants. This implies that, at least in the early stages, the Bantu expansion was mainly a demic diffusion with little incorporation of local populations.