The 1820s Coffee Boom and the Slave Trade's Last Gasp in Brazil

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History · Jul 17, 2026 · 6m · transcript

By the 1820s, the British Navy had been patrolling the Atlantic for over a decade, hunting illegal slave ships. But in Brazil, a coffee boom was fueling a new wave of human trafficking. This episode of The Atlantic Slave Trade traces the story of the 'coffee barons' of the Paraíba Valley, the rise of the illegal slave trade after 1831, and the brutal conditions on the coffee plantations that replaced sugar as the engine of slavery. We explore how the British Anti-Slavery Squadron intercepted ships like the 'Providencia' and 'Camões', the diplomatic tensions…