Important dates

1500: Europeans arrive in Brazil. Estimates of between 2 and 8.5 million Indians living in Brazil.

1510s-1870: an estimated 12 to 18 million slaves transported from Africa to the Americas

1520s-1851: African slave trade to Brazil; an estimate of 4.5 million slaves transported to Brazil from various parts of Africa.

1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution

1807: England prohibits the the international slave trade to its Caribbean colonies

1808: United States prohibits the international slave trade to the United States, as stipulated in Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution, passed in 1787

1790s-1860: An internal slave trade that sent an estimated one million slaves out of the upper south into the deep south and west of the United States continued into the early 1860s

September 1822: Independence declared in Brazil

July 1823: Independence attained in Brazil with defeat of Portuguese troops in Bahia

1823-1869: Abolition of slavery in mainland Spanish America

1831: The “Baptist Revolt” in the British colony of Jamaica

1833: Emancipation declared in the British colonies resulting in the liberation of 800,000 slaves

1835: Revolt of the Malês in Salvador, Bahia

1848: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels publish The Communist Manifesto

1850-51: End of the international slave trade to Brazil

1830s-1881: An internal slave trade in Brazil that transferred at least 222,500 slaves from the North-Northeast to the Center-South provinces

1861-1865: United States Civil War

1864-1870 War of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Paraguayan War

1865-1875: Reconstruction in the US South

1870: End of the slave trade to Cuba

1870: Passage of the Law of the Free Womb in Cuba and Puerto Rico

September 1871: The Law of the Free Womb, also known as the Rio Branco Law, passed in Brazil

1873 Slavery ended in Puerto Rico

1886 Slavery ended in Cuba

May 1888: An imperial decree is signed ending slavery in Brazil, the last nation to end slavery in the Americas.

November 1889: A military coup d’état ends Brazil's monarchy and the First Republic is established.

1893-97: The town known as Canudos is created in northeast Bahia by the followers of a charismatic leader named Antônio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor). Attracting common folk of the interior and former slaves, within four years its population grew to 25,000 inhabitants, making it the second largest city in the state of Bahia. Viewed as a threat to the new Republic and the planter elite of Bahia, military troops destroyed the city and killed most of its inhabitants in September and October 1897.