44 Michèle Ducketships was immaterial: Spanish, French, Brazilian or American. If one compares
the growth of the slave population in the two main countries involved in slavery
on the American continent, namely the United States and Brazil, it appears
that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were approximately
1 million slaves in each of them, but by the beginning of the War of Secession
the figure had grown to nearly 4 million in the United States as against 1.5
million in Brazil. The United States had thus amassed sufficient human 'capi-
tal' to develop its new cotton fields without being unduly hard on the slaves.
In Brazil, where there was a steadily increasing demand for labour on the sugar
plantations and on the recently developed coffee plantations, the intensive
use of slave labour caused a rise in the mortality rate. Hence the need, after a
while, to resort to local labour and, from the 1860s onwards, to a policy of
immigration.^67
The slave trade was now no longer an answer to a steady, guaranteed
demand for African labour, but was subject to market fluctuations, economic
changes and the relative importance of sugar, cotton or coffee. As it was mostly
clandestine, there were no longer the enormous profits to be earned that had
attracted the slave-traders. And yet it was to persist until it was finally deprived
of its clientèle by the defeat of the southern states and the suppression of
slavery in Brazil, that is until such time as it could no longer fulfil the basic
function it had had in the pre-industrial economy.
But just as in Africa the colonial powers were reducing to 'slavery'
whole sections of the local population by forcing them to do all kinds of labour,
drudgery and compulsory service, it was inevitable that the slave trade should
continue to exist in other forms. The best-known example is Sao Tomé, a
Portuguese island off the coast of Angola.^68 It is probably not the only case of
its kind, but it is significant for the way in which the whole 'system' was carried
over there without appearing to transgress the 'law'. For the Code of 1878
specified labour conditions in the Portuguese African provinces: free labour
and a five-year contract. But from the 1860s onwards, 2,000 to 4,000 Africans
were shipped to Sao Tomé (and also to the island of Principe) each year;
hunted down in the Angolan interior, chained together, embarked as contrac-
tual labour, they were shipped off to the cocoa plantations, whence they never
returned. Public opinion was first roused in 1865 by protests from members
of the 'Anglo-Portuguese Commission on Slavery'. An English journalist,
Henry W. Nevinson, spoke of a new slave trade (A Modern Slavery, 1906) and
succeeded in having a commission of inquiry sent out to investigate.^69 Other
'workers' were exported in this way from Mozambique to the Transvaal:
there were approximately 80,000 of them a year, and they were rounded up by
an association comprising 250 'recruiting agents'. Assimilation laws passed
in 1926, 1929 and 1933 failed to put an end to 'forced labour'.
Another example: when in 1894 and 1895 decrees were issued prohibiting