Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Hardcover. VG-/VG- (ex-library with labels and stamps on spine, block, inside front and rear covers and title page verso. Light shelfwear but pages are otherwise very clean and clear.). Burgundy cloth boards with silver lettering; burgundy dj with bw illustration; xxx, 770 pp, bw illustrations. Contents: The people of Western Central Africa -- The value of material goods and people in African political economies: an interpretation --Foreign imports and their uses in the political economy of Western Central Africa -- The production of people: political consolidation and the release of dependents for export -- The demography of slaving -- Bridging the gap: the structure of the African commercial and transport sector -- A history of competition, comparative advantage, and credit: the African commercial and transport sector in the eighteenth century -- Casualties of merchant capital: the Luso-Africans in Angola -- The white man's grave: expatriate merchants in Luanda -- Floating tombs: the maritime trade of the Brazilians.; Voyage of no return: the experience of enslavement: flight disease, and death -- Trading on the fringes: the rise of Brazilian interests in the Southern Atlantic slave trade to the 1770s -- Toward the center: Brazilian investment in the Southern Atlantic trade, ca. 1780-1810 -- Back to trading on the fringes: liberalism, abolition, and the British in Brazil in the nineteenth century -- The slave duty contracts in the Southern Atlantic, before 1760 -- "Freedom of trade" in the Pombal Era, 1755-1772 -- The dry well, 1772-1810 -- Lisbon's lost colony, 1810-1830 -- The economics of mortality.; Appendix A. Comparative estimates of basic labor rations --Appendix B. Estimate of mortality among slaves awaiting sale in the new world -- Appendix C. Principal authors of documentation cited.