British Slaveholders in Brazil Census, 1848-1849

The British Slaveholders in Brazil Census (BSBC) dataset contains information collated from an official survey of British slaveholding interests in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil. Commissioned by then-Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston in 1848, the BSBC provides details of 174 British individuals, groups of individuals, and enterprises, responsible for the enslavement of an estimated 3442 Africans and their descendants in Brazil. As one of two comparable surveys of British slaveholding in foreign territories, the BSBC is a unique snapshot of the continued British involvement in global slavery beyond the Abolition Act of 1833.