British merchant capital drove Brazil’s slave imports and independence

Evidence

Of course, it was new sources of capital invested directly and indirectly in Brazil’s trade and production that lay behind the massive slave imports of the period. And it was primarily an English merchant class (with support from Portuguese trade, American shipping, and other interests), anxious to dominate or monopolize a world market whose tropical commodities had been expropriated from their French competitors by the Haitian Revolution, which subsidized both the effort at political independence for Brazil from Portugal and the accelerating Africanization of Brazil’s economy. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Africanization of Brazil’s economy connects to broader Atlantic-history reading of Haiti’s expropriation of French commodities.