Free and Unfree Labor in the Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Amazon (original) (raw)
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Oxford University Press eBooks, 2012
Brazil was the American society that received the largest contingent of African slaves in the Americas and the longest-lasting slave regime in the Western Hemisphere. This is the first complete modern survey of the institution of slavery in Brazil and how it affected the lives of enslaved Africans. It is based on major new research on the institution of slavery and the role of Africans and their descendants in Brazil. Although Brazilians have incorporated many of the North American debates about slavery, they have also developed a new set of questions about slaveholding: the nature of marriage, family, religion, and culture among the slaves and free colored; the process of manumission; and the rise of the free colored class during slavery. It is the aim of this book to introduce the reader to this latest research, both to elucidate the Brazilian experience and to provide a basis for comparisons with all other American slave systems.
The Rights of Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Current Trends in Slavery Studies in Brazil, 2023
This paper addresses the rights of liberated Africans in Brazil, discussing the circumstances, regulations, and juridical proceedings surrounding the implementation of the peculiar statute, the exploitation of mandatory labor, and their definitive emancipation. The history of liberated Africans in Brazil draws its logic from the complex dynamic of Brazilian nation formation – one marked by the continuation of the illegal trade in enslaved Africans and intense British pressure for its abolition.
International Review of Social History, 2009
This essay discusses the relationship between Brazilian labour laws and the labour arrangements entered into by former slaves (libertos -freed persons) in Brazil during the nineteenth century. It discusses firstly how the definition of ''contract'' was important in guiding the labour laws on Brazilian national and immigrant workers, as well as on former slaves. By analysing a sample of labour contracts entered into by freed persons and recorded in the archives of notaries in the southern Brazilian city of Desterro (now Florianó polis) between the 1840s and 1887, this essay discusses too the conflicted meanings of ''freedom of labour'' to freed persons and their employers. It attempts further to show how efforts to deal with precariousness were central to the strategies of freed persons and the negotiations underlying those contracts. Finally, this essay aims to understand the possible reasons for the disappearance of the contracts from notarial records after the end of slavery.
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2005
government policy makers ' (p. 135) in the early 1930s, an attitude that would only be reinforced during the dictatorship of the Estado Novo. Thus, he concludes, ' worker agitation was as much if not more a caso de polícia under Vargas as it had been during the First Republic ' (p. 139). Drowning in Laws is an excellent discussion of-and engagement with-several of the most important threads in the historiography on Vargas and Brazilian statelabour relations, reflecting French's substantial experience in this field. It is, however-somewhat surprisingly if we are to judge by the title-less about labour law. French points out the often paradoxical reference to labour law in workers' rhetoric as, on the one hand, an ideal and a hope, and, on the other, as a fraud. But even if this discursive element-how the law is talked about-is important, it can only be a starting point to finding out how the law actually worked. Here, French offers little more than the general reflection that there existed an abyss between the CLT on paper and the CLT in practice and that the slow process of the labour courts often prevented workers from obtaining their legal rights. While this is plausible, it does not help us understand more about the nature of Brazilian labour law. How did severance pay, pensions, accident compensation, union recognition and collective bargaining work in practice ? Were there differences-and what were they-between the individual and collective aspects of labour law ? How did interpretations of the laws change over time ? How did the federal nature of the Brazilian state influence the workings of labour law ? What were the legal strategies used by employers to circumvent the laws ? And what were the legal strategies attempted by workers to enforce them ? These are all questions the answers to which would have helped us understand more, both about the nature of the CLT, and why workers simultaneously rejected and idealised it. We might even understand more about why workers resorted to the labour courts in increasing numbers in the period following the courts' establishment, in spite of all the evident obstacles they faced.
The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)
International Review of Social History, 2011
Although it seems that slaves in Brazil in the nineteenth century had a better chance of achieving freedom than their counterparts in other slave societies in the Americas, studies also show that a significant proportion of manumissions there were granted conditionally. Freedom might be dependent on a master's death, on a master's daughter marriage, on continued service for a number of years, etc. The article thus focuses on controversies regarding conditional manumission to explore the legal and social ambiguities between slavery and freedom that prevailed in nineteenth-century Brazilian society. Conditional manumission appeared sometimes as a form of labor contract, thought of as a situation in which a person could be nominally free and at the same time subject to forms of compulsory labor. In the final crisis of abolition, in 1887-1888, with slaves leaving the plantations in massive numbers, masters often granted conditional manumission as an attempt to guarantee the compulsory labor of their bonded people for more years.
Enslaved and Free Workers and the Growth of the Working Class in Brazil
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2021
Since the early successful colonial enterprises in Brazil’s territory, men and women forcibly transferred from Africa were used as enslaved workers not only on plantations and other agricultural settings, but also in protoindustrial contexts, such as in the sugar mills and the mining trade and metallurgy. Enslaved people were also a fundamental part of the labor force in the urban artisanry, manufacturing, and the early industrial ventures in the 18th century and after Independence in 1822. In the second half of the 19th century, the first drive of industrialization, in places like Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and São Paulo, was driven by British investments led by slave-owning entrepreneurs and powered by the intensive use of enslaved labor. Foreign workers brought to the country, Brazilian free manual laborers and other poor immigrants, freed, and enslaved people often worked side by side in shipyards, gunpowder factories, mining endeavors, railways constructions, and many other activities. In Brazil, especially in urban contexts, many enslaved men and women would rent themselves out, or they would be leased out by their masters, to perform a variety of urban activities, including working in the country’s many artisan shops and industries. In doing so, not only were they able to get financial compensation for their work by becoming ganhadores (enslaved wage earners), but, in that capacity, they also experienced situations usually associated with “free” laborers, such as wage negotiation, bargaining, and even strikes. Some of the enslaved ganhadores were able to buy their own freedom and carried their experiences into their lives as free workers. Therefore, both free and unfree laborers of African descent were present in a variety of trades and enterprises, and the multiplicity of their experiences shaped the dynamics of labor relations, identity building, political and labor cultures, and individual and collective action and organization in the long history of the making of Brazilian working classes. The heterogeneity that defined the Brazilian laboring classes, composed of people of African descent as well as poor White Portuguese settlers and other immigrants, united and divided by race, gender, nationality, legal status, histories, and cultural backgrounds cannot be stressed enough. It is crucial to understand how the institution of slavery impacted the social and economic relations of all workers, free and unfree, in Brazil even after slavery was abolished in 1888: its legacy of oppression, but also diversity, is expressed in the conflicts and collaborations that marked workers’ collective experience and impacted the transformations that the working classes underwent in post-emancipation Brazil.
European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 2009
This paper aims to discuss the process of delegitimisation of Brazilian slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Several reasons contributed to delegitimise the slave regime in Brazil, such as the end of the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of the average price of a slave and the growing number of manumissions. A large number of these manumissions were obtained through freedom suits, in which slaves brought lawsuits against their masters arguing in the courts that they had the right to be freed. The paper focuses specifically on the freedom suits initiated in the late 1860s on the border of Brazil with Uruguay. In these lawsuits, slaves argued that, because they had crossed the border and stepped on free Uruguayan soil, they had the right to be freed once they returned to Brazil. Lawyers based their petitions on an 1831 law that prohibited the entrance of slaves into Brazilian territory. It also demonstrates that the free soil concept, after being considered juridically legitimate by the courts, was used by abolitionist lawyers throughout the country in the 1870s, contributing to the political movement that ended the slave regime in Brazil.
Agostinho Black American Colonization in Brazilian Amazon article
SÆCULUM – Revista de História [v. 25, n. 43], 2020
In the 1860s, when post-emancipation debates reached transnational significance, Brazil and the United States were the only two countries in the Americas where slavery was still legal. While Brazil was recognized as a place where “colour is no obstacle to advancement” (CHRISTIE, 1865, 78), the United States witnessed the emergence of the belief that “the races cannot live together in a state of freedom” (WEBB, 1853). Considering that context, the fortuitous encounter of a New York Times article from 1862 aroused my curiosity for it reported a project to transplant Afrodescendants from the United States to the Brazilian Amazon. Such a project remained virtually ignored by the Brazilian historiography, except for the book published by Nícia Vilela Luz in 1968, denouncing the American intentions to colonize the Amazon. Although the so-called “negro colonization” project never yielded an official proposition to the Brazilian government, it still deserves examination. I argue that, in the present context of global exchanges and migrations, this historical event gains new relevance. The intention of transferring an entire category of the population from one national territory to another raises questions about citizenship and national sovereignty. At the same time, it opens the opportunity for a transnational approach that can illuminate otherwise unseen aspects of migrations.
LIVING IN THE AMAZON STATES AND THE CONTROL AND DOMINATION STRATEGIES OF THE IMPERIAL STATE OF BRAZIL (Atena Editora), 2021
This article analyzes the discourses on the way of life of the populations that occupied the Amazonian hinterlands of the 19th century, in this case, the provinces of Pará and Amazonas, residing on the banks of rivers and streams and who worked in extractive activities and planting in small swiddens. Using government and expedition reports as Sources, we demonstrate how these values, associated with agricultural activity, required the State to perform not only in maintaining order, but as an institution promoting policies that would elevate the habits of populations in the Amazon, in dissonance with life experience of the locals.