Reviews 605

it a wonderful candidate for undergraduate courses concerning early

national culture.
David Stradling
University of Cincinnati

doi: 10.1093/es/khp027

Advance Access publication July 10, 2009

Downloaded from http://es.oxfordjournals.org/ at Soka University of American Ikeda Library on September 21, 2013
João Pedro Marques. 2006. The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century
Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, trans. Richard Wall. European
Expansion and Global Interaction Series. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
304 pp. ISBN 978-1571814470, $80.00 (cloth).

Between 1810 and 1868, ships with Portuguese flags carried approx-
imately two-thirds of the African slaves destined for the Americas;
yet, considerably less is known about this period of Luso-slavocracy
than is known about British anti-slavery efforts or the closing of slave
importations in Brazil and Cuba. Taking the hunch that Portuguese
opinion and politics should also be considered in this story, João
Pedro Marques set out to explore archives in Lisbon and London.
In Sounds of Silence, a translated edition of a book published in
Portuguese in 1999, readers will find a pioneering and deeply re-
searched work, relevant to modern European history, the Atlantic
World, and slavery.
Marques begins his book by looking at the period between 1800 and
1840 to argue against the idea of Portuguese indifference or an inter-
nal ideological void to the slave trade (Chapters 1–4). He convincingly
shows that the “sounds of silence” was instead a clearly articulated
position of “tolerationism” toward the “odious commerce,” although
this toleration had different shades of reason and degrees of emphasis.
After 1840, attitudes changed. Portuguese statesmen called for the end
of the slave trade as a way to defend the nation’s honor in the face of
mounting pressure from England (Chapter 5). On this point, Marques
disagrees with an older Marxist interpretation that views these actions
as a way to alter and expand colonial exploitation in a humanitar-
ian disguise. The Portuguese were so disinterested in developmental
projects for their African colonies, in fact, that ending the slave trade
seemed to have aroused few expectations for that investments would
increase (Chapter 6). Within these chronology and claims we find
the book’s chief merit; that is, it does not downplay the importance
of external events to Portuguese action, but instead it shows that an
internal debate regarding slave trading emerged, evolved, and even-
tually had a role to play. For example, anti-slave trading action, such
606 ENTERPRISE & SOCIETY

as seizures of slaving vessels by the Portuguese Armada in the 1840s,

was a product of both external pressure and internal design.
Chapters 1 and 6 are particularly easy to read and offer enthralling
vignettes of attitudes toward slavery and colonialism in the nineteenth
century. These chapters might make good assignments for high-level
undergraduate surveys. Additionally, undergraduates could benefit
from a discussion of the author’s methods and choice of primary
sources, especially when it comes to his interpretation of public opin-
ion. Marques admits that he remains “deliberately close to the doc-
uments,” an approach that should be of value to graduate students
exploring the overlap of politics and elite ideology. For specialists in-
terested in Europe and the Atlantic world, Sounds of Silence should
be included with recent publications by Paul Kielstra, David Mur-
ray, and Johannes Postma on British, Spanish, and Dutch slave trad-
ing. This group is quickly changing and expanding our knowledge of
Europe’s role in both perpetuating and ending the slave trade.
Marques supports his position with evidence taken from years of
laborious analysis of dense newspapers and lengthy diplomatic pa-
pers. The result is rich synthesis of unearthed ideas, but one that
sometimes insufficiently engages wider scholarly discussions. Some
of this might be attributable to a lack of interest on his part. It ap-
pears that the terrain of racial ideology was shifting, as evidenced
by the words of supporters and opponents of slave trading that Mar-
ques quotes, yet he portrays racial ideas of Africans as static and
unimportant, unlike the dynamic ideas of the trade. Other disengage-
ments stem from the decision not to update this translated edition.
A quick look at the bibliography reveals that little attention has been
paid to research after 1999. For example, when Marques compares
the sharp complaints regarding the 1810 and 1815 Anglo-Portuguese
treaties coming from Bahia to the muted responses coming from Rio
de Janeiro, he does not address the fact that Rio de Janeiro cemented
its position as Brazil’s primary slave importer through these agree-
ments. This change disadvantaged Bahia and Brazil’s Northeastern
ports, as Manolo Florentino’s research has suggested.
Readers interested in the economic side of this story—after all, this
was a business—will need to wait for another monograph. Finally, the
publishers of the English version oddly exclude a table with estimates
of the numbers of slave ships and slaves carried with Portuguese
flags. Without such a table, many will not realize the significance
of Marques’s book because they will be unaware of the extent that
Portuguese dominated the slave trade.
Admittedly, these critical points are minor compared to the bene-
fits of this book. They should not take from the fact that this work
elucidates, with clear prose and abundant evidence, a new and
 Reviews 607

important finding: the top slave trading nation of the nineteenth cen-
tury did not act only upon British will, but developed its own anti-
slavery attitudes within a nationalistic context.
Ian Read
Soka University of America

doi: 10.1093/es/khp020

Advance Access publication June 30, 2009