In Chapter 5, I explore Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican and argue that liberation of the enslaved Africans in Brazil, Portugal and Spain was part of a wider Atlantic question. By allying himself with these different constituencies in the Atlantic, Mendonça emphasised that his call for freedom was universal – abolition should go beyond the African frontier to include New Christians and Indigenous Americans. Mendonça’s evidence-based court case challenged the established assertion that Africa was a slaving society that already practised and willingly aided the European Atlantic slave trade. His evidence demonstrated how the mechanics of the Atlantic slave trade operated in Africa, and how violence was used as a strategy for maintaining the institution of slavery. The accused were the Vatican and the Italian, Portuguese, and the Spanish political governing authorities, and Mendonça brought together African accusers from different organisations, confraternities and interest groups. This is a significant reinterpretation of slavery and abolition, revealing a new understandings of Mendonça’s criminal court case in the Vatican as a Black Atlantic abolition movement.

This book, based on a dataset with 2,214 abolitionist events, makes the case that the campaign for the abolition of slavery in Brazil was a structured and lasting network of activists, associations, and public demonstrations, a national social movement. In this sense, this study shows civil society mobilization was not a particular feature of Anglo-American abolitionism.The Brazilian abolitionist movement's actions are explained here from a relational perspective, focusing on its contentious relations – in the public space and inside political institutions – with governments as well as with a pro-slavery countermovement. Besides, the book places Brazil in a global history of abolitionist movements, showing how local activists hooked onto the global abolitionist network and appropriated the repertoire of contention – rhetoric, strategies, and political performances – put together by previous anti-slavery movements. Brazilians adapted this repertoire to local political tradition. Given the formal link between church and State in Brazil, abolitionists preferred secular rhetoric and theater to propaganda. In this sense, it was more modern than the somewhat religiously embedded Anglo-Saxon abolitionism.