Brazil held nearly two million enslaved Africans by 1798

Evidence

“For Brazil,” Inikori writes, “the first reliable census … in 1798 … showed that there were 1,988,000 negroes in that country by this time.” (By the eighteenth century, of course, Portugal’s monopoly in the Atlantic slave trade had been superseded first by the Netherlands, and was now the business of the merchants and ruling classes of England and France.) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 562