The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil by A.J.R. Russell-Wood

By A.J.R. Russell-Wood

Slaves and freedmen of African origins within the English north American colonies and later usa were gadgets of severe scholarly scrutiny, however the life-styles and contributions by way of their opposite numbers to the societies and economies of Portuguese the United States are commonly missed. but it was once in Brazil that plantation slavery on a wide scale used to be initiated within the Americas, and which absorbed better numbers of individuals of African descent than the other zone of the continent. This quantity seeks to redress the stability, combining principally unpublished archival resources with modern money owed and glossy scholarship as a way to current the slaves and freedmen of the colony to a much wider team of readers. the writer emphasises the distance among the letter of the legislations, professional interpretations, and daily truth. variations of topography, the predominating enterprise, chronology, and demography, have been yet a few elements contributing to the measure of self-determination or freedom accorded to an individual of African descent. there has been a fragile stability among such exterior stipulations and private attributes in picking the jobs of such women and men in a slavocratic society within which for the main half individuals of eu descent have been in a numerical minority. this isn't a background couched when it comes to extremes: black or white; slave or grasp; eu or African. relatively it's the historical past of a society designated to the Americas during which flexibility, permeability, ambiguities, and nuances led to a consistently evolving and revolving play among freedom and bondage, among the person and the higher group, among legislation and compromise, among colony and mom state. it is a heritage of the play of sunshine and colour, every one part altering in its courting to the opposite, in its volume and in its depth: in brief the chiaroscuro which used to be Portuguese the United States - an appreciation of that is necessary to an figuring out of recent Brazil.

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Only by a successful performance in the theoretical and practical parts of such examinations would a licence be granted by the town council to practise as qualified artisans ami open shops. The outstanding exception was the art of 'barber' (barbeiro). We shall be returning to this later (p. 56) and suffice it to say here that this profession was virtually a monopoly ofblacks and mulattos, and one in which slaves predominated. As in the case of the artisan slave day worker, slave 'barbers' had unusual opportunities of making social contacts and earning enough money to buy their freedom.

An initial deterrent was the widely circulated belief that all documents bearing on slavery in Brazil had been systematically destroyed at the time of abolition. Exposed as the myth that it was, nevertheless only in the last decades have the holdings of Brazilian archives for the colonial period received the long-overdue attention of researchers. Mines of information on all aspects of the colonial experience, and especially on the economic and political dimensions of the colonial pact, rarely do these voluminous records provide indications as to the value systems and attitudes of persons of colour.

Whereas the Bantu had preferred Asiatic and European goods in the barter for slaves, the Sudanese preferred tobacco, and in particular the tobacco brushed with molasses as produced in Bahia. This enabled Bahian slave traders to deal directiy with the so-called Mina coast, rather than depending on the merchants of Lisbon or making transhipments from Indiamen wh ich put ioto Bahia. Another factor was nothing less fickle and unpredictable than a change in slave fashions. In 1700 the slaves from the Mina coast had been held in low repute and plantation owners had refused to buy any but Angolan slaves.

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