Tracing Afro-Atlantic Agroecologies: Early Modern Written Sources from Africa, Brazil, and the Alentejo (Southern Portugal)

The aim of this dataset is to compile a list of relevant written sources concerning the introduction of African crops into southern Portugal from the Early Modern period onward. The sources identified include chorographic accounts, travel narratives by foreign visitors, visitation records by members of the Order of Santiago (the principal landowner in the Alentejo), agricultural treatises, dictionaries, and botanical works related to the region.
Over the course of the research, it became evident that understanding the agricultural context along the African coasts was essential for identifying which crops might have had the potential to be introduced into Portuguese territory. Accordingly, all available European narratives referring to the Atlantic coast of Africa and containing relevant information were collected. A similar approach was applied to Brazil, in an effort to understand the mechanisms of crop transfer across the Atlantic space.
This research was conducted within the framework of the project Ecologies of Freedom: Materialities of Slavery and Post-Emancipation in the Atlantic World (PTDC/HAR-ARQ/4540/2021), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through the projects UIDB/00698/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/00698/2020) and UIDP/00698/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDP/00698/2020).