"Por conto e peso": o comércio de marfim no Congo e Loango, séculos XV – XVII

Abstract

RESUMO: O artigo descreve a implantação do comércio de marfim na costa centro-ocidental africana entre 1490 e 1620. Essa região tem sido estudada do ponto de vista do comércio atlântico de escravos, mas não existem estudos dedicados ao marfim. O comércio do marfim bruto aparece na historiografia como referência passageira. Já a circulação do marfim lavrado tem sido estudada a partir de objetos encontrados nos museus europeus, ponto final de uma longa cadeia diplomática e comercial. Tomando como referência o comércio de marfim nos portos da costa do Congo e Loango, o texto estabelece o contexto africano de acesso ao marfim antes do crescimento do comércio de escravos na região, destacando sua importância no conjunto das atividades econômicas da época. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Marfim. Loango. Comércio. Congo. África centro-ocidental.ABSTRACT: This article describes the organization of the ivory trade in West Central Africa between 1490 and 1620. The region has been scrutinized by scholars working on the Atlantic slave trade, but not on the ivory trade. Carved ivory studies, by the way, approach art objects that correspond to the end of a long chain of diplomatic and commercial exchanges, frequently without exact provenance and date of the referred objects. The paper focuses on the trade of raw ivory in Loango and Congo presenting the context of trade, and its commercial relevance among other commodities in order to demonstrate the importance of the ivory trade in those ports before the growth of the slave trade.

Sourcing Elephant Ivory from a Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Shipwreck

“…Raw and carved ivories were exported from the Atlantic coast of Africa to Portugal from the mid-15 th century [19,20]. Of three major regions believed to export ivory to Portugal [1,3,21], our genetic findings were consistent with an origin in Senegambia or the Gulf of Guinea (Figure 2) but rule out the Loango coast in Central Africa [22].…”

“…Due to the difficulty of maneuvering large long-distance trading vessels and the dangers of sailing close to the shore, outgoing ships on the India route typically did not tack along the West African coastline, but would sail from Portugal southwest across the Atlantic and then southeast on the trade winds [21,46]. Ivory from West Africa was frequently shipped to the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé, to be counted, weighed, and sent via smaller vessels to Casa da Índia in Lisbon, the central clearing house for African and Indian imports to Portugal [22,[46][47][48]. Centralized loading of outgoing long-distance trading vessels (naus) in Lisbon enabled tight control of the valuable cargo.…”