Rocha's 'The Ethiopian Redeemed' and the Circulation of Anti-Slavery Ideas

Abstract

At the end of the 1820s the Reverend R. Walsh arrived in Brazil as the Chaplain of Viscount Strangford, the British Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Brazil. In between his clerical duties, Walsh visited the Imperial Library of Rio de Janeiro to search for a book written by a Portuguese priest 70 years before. He had heard that the book made ‘a considerable sensation’ at the time and was anxious to check the truth that his proposals defined the slave trade as piracy, anticipating the anti-slavery sentiments of the people of England. After reading it, he solemnly stated: ‘If the Portuguese were the first Europeans to make negro slaves, it is but justice to them to say, that they were among the first to exclaim against the traffic.’ My aim in this article is to approach the issue of the circulation of emerging anti-slavery ideas between colonial Brazil, Portugal, Great Britain and France as well as their colonies and also the United States during the first years of independence. I shall analyse the book Etiope Resgatado, empenhado, sustentado, corrigido, instruido e libertado [The Ethiopian Redeemed, pledged, nurtured, corrected, educated, and emancipated], which was published in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1758. The book was written by the Portuguese priest, Manoel Ribeiro Rocha, during the years he lived in the city of Salvador, Bahia, which was then the capital of the royal Portuguese colony – the so-called state of Brazil. Besides being an important administrative colonial centre, Bahia was known as one of the main ports for slave ships coming from Africa. There has been much discussion over the role of this book. During the nineteenth century and until recent times the author was seen as an aheadof-his-time abolitionist and celebrated as such. More recent views insist in denying him such a revolutionary label and consider his views as belonging to the traditional pro-slavery ideology. But both sides reveal two problematic points.