Salvador
The largest Black city outside Africa (80% Afro-Brazilian) and Brazil's original slave-trade capital — where colonial-era path dependence now monetises the culture born from oppression.
Salvador is the largest Black city outside Africa — 80% of its 2.4 million residents self-identify as Black or mixed race — and also Brazil's original capital, the port through which more enslaved Africans entered the Americas than any other. Founded in 1549, Salvador served as Brazil's capital for over two centuries before the seat moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. The genetic record tells the deeper story: autosomal DNA studies show Salvador's population is 50.
8% African, 42.9% European, and 6.4% Indigenous, the biological result of 500 years of forced migration, exploitation, and intermarriage. What persists from that history is structural inequality so extreme it functions as a separate economy. Bahia holds 7% of Brazil's population but produces just 4.2% of national GDP. In Salvador, Black communities — including at least six quilombos originally founded by escaped enslaved people — fight pollution from a military base, a petroleum refinery, and the Camaçari industrial complex simultaneously.
Bahia holds 7% of Brazil's population but produces just 4.
The refinery near the Bay of All Saints, once operated by Petrobras, was privatised in 2021 and sold to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Capital — transferring a colonial-era resource extraction point from state to foreign sovereign wealth control. Bahia's economy runs on agricultural exports (cocoa, sisal, soybeans), petrochemicals, and increasingly tourism built on the Afro-Brazilian culture that slavery created. Candomblé, Capoeira, and samba emerged as survival strategies of enslaved populations forbidden from practising their religions or martial traditions openly.
The Pelourinho historic centre — named after the public whipping post where enslaved people were punished — is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and tourist attraction. This is path dependence at civilisational scale: the slave port became the cultural capital, the culture born from oppression became the economic asset, and the descendants of enslaved people now service the tourism industry that monetises their ancestors' suffering. The pattern mirrors epigenetic inheritance in biology — where trauma experienced by one generation alters gene expression in subsequent generations without changing the DNA itself.
Salvador's economy expresses the genetic code of the Atlantic slave trade: the structure persists even as the original mechanism has been formally abolished.