1Mariana Candido’s Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola. A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality can be read as a sober and critical review of the birth of the modern world from the perspective of Portuguese colonial subjects in West Central Africa. The nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation, which redefined the meaning of property, labor, citizenship, among many other fundamental societal relationships. While this period is often heroically described as a period of nation- and institution-building, and of growing world markets, it should also be read as an era of massive redistribution of wealth that occurred on a local, regional, and global scale. Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola traces these transformations, outlining how the emergence of liberal ideas and policies transformed the meaning of wealth, land, and property in a colonial context: “The history of wealth accumulation and dispossession in Angola has been intertwined with the consolidation of liberal notions of progress, private property rights, land enclosure and civilization” (p. 274). From this vantage point, the Enlightenment ideals of, among others, legal security, progress, and freedom show a different texture, revealing themselves as “surreptitious” ideological components at the service of a colonial machinery geared towards the dispossession of local landholders and the continuation of dependent forms of labor.

2The Portuguese case serves this purpose well. With almost three centuries of colonial interaction before the Berlin Conference, Candido can compare the shifts in the colonial enterprise in West Central Africa with the twin nineteenth-century transformations produced by the end of the slave trade and the growing influence of liberal ideas and policies. Before the 1830s, besides some colonial centers on the coast and in the interior, Portuguese interests in West Central Africa focused more on the transatlantic slave trade than on the seizure and control of land. This left vast territorial control in the hands of local ruling elites, organized according to their own rules and traditions, which to some extent aligned with those of the Portuguese: “In West Central Africa, as well as in Portugal and other European monarchies, property claims over land, people, and things were based and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and context” (p. 52). The consolidation of the idea of “property as the most absolute way to possess things” and the end of the slave trade shifted the focus of the colonial administration towards territorial control by opening an agrarian frontier for coffee, tobacco, and cotton plantations, settling Portuguese subjects on lands held by indigenous populations, and resettling slaves and other people subject to unfree labor to the plantations in São Tomé and other parts of the empire. According to the author: “The removal of people from their places of origin was societally destabilizing and contributed to commodification but also to notions of empty and available lands. Slavery, commodification, and displacement were intimately connected and vital to colonialism’s ability to survive and generate profits” (p. 186).

3Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 centers on the control of land and the notions of possession and ownership that prevailed in West Central Africa between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It focuses on how local populations understood occupation and settlement, and the shifts that occurred with the increasing incursions of the Portuguese in the region. Chapter 2 deals with the commodification and privatization of land that began to occur because of the transformation of the notions of property rights in the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 examines the increasing importance of written records (land registries, deeds, inventories, etc.) and their association with individual ownership and property recognition. Local populations adjusted to these changes, increasingly recurring to written records to claim and defend their rights. Chapter 4 focuses on the commodification of people in West Central Africa throughout the nineteenth century via the persistence of slavery and the emergence of new forms of unfree labor after abolition. Chapter 5 centers on the people freed from slavery – libertos – and how this freedom remained nominal due to the efforts of jurists, administrators, and plantation owners to prolong a regime of forced labor under a different guise. Chapter 6 traces the construction of the idea of “vacant” lands and the dispossession of local rulers and other indigenous occupants of the land. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on the integration of West Central African populations into global commodity markets, no longer as providers of forced labor but as consumers of imported goods.

4The book also critically revisits some deep-seated historiographical narratives. One of Candido’s main concerns is to dispel the notion that West Central African populations recognized ownership of people but not of land. Historical and anthropological research had come to accept that land was abundant and plentiful, and therefore African rulers and heads of lineage had more defined ideas about ownership of people and the control of dependents than notions of land ownership. Ultimately, according to this narrative, people and not land was the basis for the accumulation of wealth in African societies. This idea, propagated by nineteenth-century jurists and colonial administrators seeking to legitimize the Portuguese occupation of land, was taken at face value and perpetuated ever since, even by recent scholarship. By looking at the importance of land for local populations in the exercise of rule, for agriculture and herding, as well as its ritual and spiritual meanings, which has hitherto not been fully recognized, Candido argues that this historical narrative has ultimately served to naturalize European conquest and dispossession: “The singular focus on the accumulation of dependents has done a disservice to the history of this region, helping to justify colonialism and normalize population displacement in the past” (p. 4).

5Another theme that is highlighted throughout the book is the role of women as consumers and producers, land and slaveowners, and their agency in resisting slavery and other forms of dependency. As with the previous narrative, the idea that women were excluded from private ownership was the product of the recording of customary law in the early twentieth century that created a gendered vision of ownership (p. 111 ff.). Candido argues the need to reconsider the accumulation of wealth by women who, contrary to the idea that they lacked property rights, were able to own and accumulate people, land, animals, and movable goods, such as jewelry, clothing, pottery, and tools. She shows how the women of Luanda and Benguela took advantage of opportunities presented by the colonial regime, by seeking permission to build houses, run taverns and shops, or own agricultural plots. Women also used the colonial bureaucracy and the judiciary to collect debts and advance and protect their economic interests and claims: “Women are not invisible or hard to find in legal cases or ecclesiastical records. In fact, they are everywhere, and it is hard to write about the Angolan past without mentioning the key roles women have played, including registering claims over things, people, and land” (p. 98). Women and young people, who could be disadvantaged in their own societies ruled by elders, often sought colonial institutions to solve their disputes. Women also occupied a vast range of economic activities, with elite women acting as moneylenders and free and slave women performing skilled labor, such as selling food, farming, leatherwork, sewing, caring for the sick, among other activities. Finally, Candido also shows how enslaved women escaped from their owners, “challenging perceptions that slave flights were mainly a male phenomenon” (p. 158).

6A third narrative addressed by Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola is the condition of freed people – libertos – in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the abolition of slavery did not mean an immediate end of the practice and generated new forms of forced labor. Under the 1869 decree that officially abolished slavery, for example, libertos were forced to remain in the employment of their former owners and work for a small compensation. Libertos also continued to be treated as slaves and could be transmitted through inheritance or sold. Freed slaves could be distributed among residents of Luanda, who put them to work, or were resettled by the colonial administration to São Tomé “where they [would] be useful” (p. 174), revealing how the newly gained status of freedom did not mean increased rights or protection against violence and forced labor. Libertos were also placed within an apprenticeship system, which had a purportedly vocational training function, but reflected how former slaves continued to perform the same work on farms and houses that they had performed before attaining their freedom. Ultimately, “[l]egal loopholes and the connivance of the colonial administrators kept slavery alive and well into the twentieth century, regardless of its legal abolition in 1875” (p. 184).

7Finally, it is worth highlighting how local practices and rules pop up regularly throughout the book, highlighting how Portuguese colonialism adapted to the local context, revealing “the coexistence of multiple norms and legal understandings in the same geographical space” (p. 160). The use of textiles as currency – dinheiro da terra – until the late nineteenth century, or the spread of the practice of pawnshop – the use of free dependents as collateral for goods given in advance or debts – used by African traders, reveal how colonialism not only imposes new but integrates local practices. Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, however, traces the evolution of Portuguese colonialism in a long-term perspective, showing how a “multi normative system of local and colonial laws [that] coexisted for three centuries [and] included some recognition of West African juridical norms” (pp. 102-103) was dismantled with the increasing association of the colonial enterprise with the liberal notions of progress, civilization, and property rights. Through the colonial history of Angola, the book confronts us with the dialectic of the Illustration and the mechanisms of extraction of wealth, land, and labor that are used by economic and political elites through the “sweet violence” of the new regimes of property and freedom.