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In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.
Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.
There was a maximum term of 14 years, after which they should all have been freed – but that did not happen. The British ambassador to Brazil became aware of the case but, citing a lack of evidence, looked the other way.
It was only more than 30 years later, when it was brought to light by a Brazilian abolitionist, that the 123 survivors were finally freed in 1879. The vast majority, however, had died in captivity.
The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern – and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America’s biggest country for another half century.
“These connections [between the UK and Brazilian slavery] are very much overlooked,” said Mulhern, who recently published the book British Entanglement with Brazilian Slavery – Commerce, Credit and Complicity in Another Empire, c. 1822–1888.
Britons learn about the country’s involvement with slavery “almost as a self-congratulatory narrative”, said Mulhern, as if the country had been a “self-appointed moral arbiter in the demise of the slave trade and slavery – despite the fact that the UK was one of the biggest countries involved in the slave trade.”
In 1831 after intense pressure from the UK, Brazil banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans. For about five years, the new law was enforced, but it was later widely ignored, which is why it became known as a law “for the English to see” – giving rise to an expression still used to refer to measures taken merely for appearances.
In his book, Mulhern shows that the disregard for the law was made possible by British merchants in Brazil who, by supplying goods and long-term credit, enabled a new class of traffickers to emerge and operate illegally. British “officials in Brazil and their superiors in London were all too aware of the intricate connections between British commercial interests and the Brazilian slave trade,” he wrote.
The trade only effectively ended in 1850 with a new law – ironically, also under pressure from the UK – but only after about 750,000 Africans had been illegally brought to Brazil since 1831.
Earlier phases of Mulhern’s research at Durham University’s department of history revealed how British banks profited from slavery in Brazil.
British financial institutions treated enslaved people as “collateral assets” for loans and mortgages. When debtors defaulted, the banks forced auctions to recover their capital – at one such sale in Rio de Janeiro in 1878, a 22-year-old mother, Caetana, was separated from her three-year-old son, Pio.
The book also includes a rare “census”, compiled at the request of Britain’s Foreign Office in 1848 and 1849, listing all “subjects” who owned enslaved people in Brazil.
Despite under-reporting, the document recorded 3,445 enslaved people held by British interests, more than half belonging to mining companies such as St John d’El Rey, which would only close more than a century later, in 1985.
The scandal of the rented enslaved people was exposed by the prominent Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, and is regarded as one of the trigger events that would ultimately lead Brazil to abolish slavery in 1888 – the last country in the Americas to do so.
Although the majority of enslaved people held by Britons were owned by companies, many small traders were also involved, including the owner of a pub.
“Even some of the very poorest British immigrants owned enslaved people,” said Mulhern, who in the book debunks a myth widely circulated at the time that Britons were “benevolent masters”.
“An analysis of the treatment of those enslaved, including illegal enslavement, acts of physical violence and sexual assault, quickly dispels that myth,” he wrote.
