Luiz Felipe de Alencastro's The Trade in the Living: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic is a fascinating and thought-provoking study of the Portuguese empire's rise to power in the South Atlantic during the long seventeenth century. Alencastro is the Director of the Centre for South Atlantic Studies at the São Paulo School of Economics (Fundação Getúlio Vargas). This book first appeared in 2000, written in Portuguese under the title O trato dos viventes. Its meticulous research, innovative arguments and graceful prose cast a bright light upon our understandings of the formation of colonial Brazil, the development of the Iberian Atlantic world and the expansion of the Luso-Atlantic slave trade. The popularity of O trato dos viventes has led the State University of New York to publish an English translation of this book.

The success of Alencastro's study stems, in part, from its transcontinental approach to the history of colonial Brazil. He centres the Brazilian slave production zones and the Angolan slave reproduction zones as the primary points of analysis. In seven chapters and five appendices, The Trade in the Living charts how these regions became the axis of slavery's two interconnected poles in the ‘Ethiopic Ocean’, one name used for the South Atlantic during the Age of Sail (p. xviii). Though 18 years have passed since the book's original publication, the translation of Alencastro's seminal work is a valuable and welcome addition to the English-language historiography of the Atlantic world.

It is important to highlight at the outset four noteworthy changes in this new edition. First, this volume includes a new three-page preface and a foreword by world historian Patrick Manning. Second, the footnotes are updated to include the relevant literature produced since 2000. Third, Alencastro amends the statistical data and analysis of the Luso-Atlantic slave trade with the revised estimates from Slave Voyages, the web-based version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD). The fourth and final change is the removal of two of the appendices that appeared in the Portuguese edition (Apêndices 4 and 7).

While Alencastro incorporates Apêndice 4 on Amador Bueno's Proclamation (1641) into the new edition of the sixth chapter, he excludes Apêndice 7 on the Angola–Brazil slave trade in light of the update to the TSTD. In O trato dos viventes, Alencastro constructs his arguments about the Angola–Brazil slave trade with the figures in the original 1999 CD-ROM version of the TSTD, which documents 770,000 enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil between 1595 and 1850. In the seventh appendix he explains why this calculation sorely underestimates the number of African captives brought to Brazil. In 2008, Emory University launched Slave Voyages with an expanded dataset based on materials and data unavailable in 1999. It increased the estimate for the disembarkations of enslaved Africans in Brazil to 1.9 million, which confirmed Alencastro's assessment.

Aside from these changes, The Trade in the Living reprises the original version's structure, evidence and arguments. The early chapters follow the Portuguese empire's efforts to manifest itself across the Ethiopic Ocean. The concluding chapters focus on the South Atlantic theatre of the Dutch–Portuguese war and the expansion of the trade between Portuguese America and West Central Africa. Both parts portray the Angola–Brazil slave trade as the key element in the politics and economy of the Ethiopic Ocean. ‘Far from being circumstantial’, Alencastro writes, ‘the bilateral slave trade in the Ethiopic Ocean stands as one of the constituent elements of the whole Atlantic system’ (p. 22).

The first chapter describes the system of domination and exploitation used by the Iberian empires to colonise the South Atlantic. Though this system created an array of challenges for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, it also enabled the Portuguese to develop and sustain the bilateral trade between Angola and Brazil. The next two chapters explore the social, political, environmental and commercial forces that enabled the Portuguese empire to control the slave trade. The fourth chapter contrasts the Amerindian and African slave trades, emphasising the mercantile, religious, political and epidemiological reasons for the decline of Amerindian slavery, which increased the importation of enslaved Africans in Portuguese America. Chapter 5 investigates the Catholic priesthood's debates over the slave trade. These conversations created a missionary system that rationalised the commercial trade in enslaved Africans and endorsed pro-indigenous policies in Portuguese America.

The sixth and seventh chapters offer a fresh view of the Dutch–Portuguese war by dealing with this imperial conflict through the prism of the South Atlantic Ocean. This section aims to ‘attenuate doubts that may have persisted from the preceding pages’ about the centrality of the Brazil–Angola slave trade in the South Atlantic (p. 184). One of the most convincing ways that Alencastro achieves this goal is through his assessment of the Dutch empire's strategy in the South Atlantic. He argues that the Dutch West India Company's invasions of the Brazilian Nordeste region, Elmina, São Tomé and Angola reveal the Dutch recognition of the strategic value and importance of the bilateral slave trade in the Ethiopic Ocean.

The Trade in the Living is an impressive warehouse of information on the early modern Portuguese empire and the formation of colonial Brazil. It might disappoint some readers that this new edition does not contain any substantially new material or engage with the innovative approaches offered in the latest studies on the history of the South Atlantic. But Alencastro defends this decision on the grounds that ‘merging this new research and documentation into the chapters would lead to a wholly different book’ (p. xvii). He also mentions that he will incorporate these materials in the complementary book he plans to write of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of Brazil. In summary, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro's The Trade in the Living is a tour de force that will extend his influence to the English-language scholarship on the Atlantic world.