New research reveals that British companies and citizens continued to profit from slavery in Brazil for decades after the UK banned the practice in 1833. Historian Joseph Mulhern, author of 'British Entanglement with Brazilian Slavery', highlights how British involvement in Brazilian slavery is often overlooked in favour of a self-congratulatory narrative about Britain's role in abolition.
One notorious case involves the St John d'El Rey mining company, which in 1845 'rented' 385 enslaved people in Brazil, a practice permitted under the 1843 Slave Trade Act. Despite a maximum term of 14 years, the enslaved were not freed until 1879 after a Brazilian abolitionist exposed the case. By then, only 123 survivors remained.
British merchants also enabled the illegal slave trade after Brazil banned trafficking in 1831 under British pressure. The law was widely ignored, leading to the phrase 'for the English to see'. Mulhern shows that British suppliers provided goods and credit to a new class of traffickers, with officials aware of the connections. The trade only ended in 1850 after about 750,000 Africans had been illegally brought to Brazil.
British banks treated enslaved people as collateral for loans, forcing auctions when debtors defaulted. In one 1878 sale in Rio de Janeiro, a mother was separated from her young son. A Foreign Office census from 1848-49 recorded 3,445 enslaved people held by British interests, mostly by mining companies like St John d'El Rey, which operated until 1985.
Mulhern debunks the myth of Britons as 'benevolent masters', noting that even poor British immigrants owned enslaved people. The scandal exposed by abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco helped trigger Brazil's final abolition in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
