Slaves constituted the broad base of Bahian society, the bedrock on which it rested. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, about one-third of the captaincy's 500,000 inhabitants were enslaved; but in sugar-plantation zones, that proportion sometimes reached as high as 70 percent. We have already examined the nature of slave work, the characteristics of the plantation organization, and some aspects of master–slave relations. In this chapter, we will discuss the demographic features of the Bahian slaves in order to understand their life experiences and the range of opportunities and chances open to them. The use of a demographic approach is necessary because of the personal anonymity imposed on the majority of slaves by the documentary record. What remains is fragmentary, but it still contains enough information to suggest the conditions that Brazilian slaves endured. In the aggregated figures, we can perhaps recover some idea of personal experience.

From the gradual disappearance of Indian slavery in Bahia in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century until the end of the slave trade in 1850, the central fact of Bahian, and indeed Brazilian, slavery was the African origin of the majority of those in bondage.