Five contexts conditioned papal relations to enslavement 1500–1800. (1) From Roman times, Christians understood enslavement as morally licit, and Christian thought was necessarily conservative when it came to social action. (2) Centuries of Christian–Muslim military conflict and mutual enslavement in the Mediterranean – and thus religious and not racial concerns – underwrote bulls authorizing Portuguese slaving in Africa. (3) While popes could make recommendations and excommunicate transgressors, the forces of state power and creeping secularism were infinitely greater. Thus, when popes called to cease or modify terms of enslavement, burgeoning capitalist goals often led colonial settlers and individual merchant opportunists to ignore these directives. (4) In Rome, the Papal States, and the early modern Mediterranean, popes employed slaves of various ethnicities to labor throughout their realms. (5) Both at home and overseas, papal will was extended, mediated, and at times altered by a broad universe of agents such as cardinals, nuncios, and missionaries.

This chapter investigates the reverberations of the Oporto liberal revolution and Brazilian independence on the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa. Angola was the largest supplier of enslaved labor for recently independent Brazil, yet the ties between the two regions stretched well beyond the transatlantic slave trade. A cultural and social continuum connected the South Atlantic World, and the chapter argues that such ties acquired a political dimension in the wake of the Oporto revolution and Brazil’s secession from Portugal. To trace how Angola’s coastal elites responded to the end of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, the chapter reconstructs the trajectory of a single individual, the Luanda born Domingos Pereira Diniz, who became the president of the Benguela Junta, a governmental body which endorsed a petition in which Benguela’s elite requested the right to become an overseas province of independent Brazil.