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Slavery research has been dominated since c.1970 by two cultures of historiography and memory: those of the USA and Brazil - though completely unbalanced from a European perspective, with some 80 per cent of publications and research originating in the USA against 10 per cent in Brazil, despite a very important research institute in Canada (The Harriet Tubman Institute).1 Brazilian global-historical research dominates the history of the South Atlantic and naturally enough that of the Brazilian internal market. In Brazil itself, besides slavery research on the Anglo-American space (centred on the USA), there exists the best, quantitatively most comprehensive and detailed research in the world into slavery, the slave trade, and the slave condition, as well as national post-emancipation research that includes local-historical studies. This too is only natural, given that Brazil was the largest slave society in the world in its time.2 So, in a consequent global perspective, Brazil was the most important slave and slave trade society, and it is today the country with the most important historiography. With reference to the above mentioned distortion, John W. Sweet in a recent article claims that there are myths in the history of the slave trade in a macro-historical perspective: the myth of the primordial importance of North America and the myth of the nineteenth century as a "century of abolition" since 1808 (in reality North America was, until 1850, a periphery of the Spanish Caribbean).3
The remaining historiography of slavery is divided diffusely between other national historiographies: the British (often combined with the US into the Anglo-American historiography of slavery), followed particularly by the Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, the Baltic states (Denmark, Brandenburg, Sweden), Hamburg, Bremen, and Switzerland.4 The historiography of different internal slaveries in Africa confronts particular difficulties, while the Atlantic slave trade from Africa 1650-1800 is relatively well known.5
Difficulties with the subject in Europe and Latin America also arise time and again in Spain, which from 1493 to 1898 possessed the largest colonial empire in the Americas (still including Cuba and Puerto Rico after 1825), with the longest history of slavery. Spain as a colonial power had no areas for obtaining slaves in Africa until the end of the eighteenth century. The particular view...