27 - Runaways and Quilombolas in the Americas

Summary

RUNAWAYS

In the Americas, as in precolonial Africa, slavery's reproduction was structurally linked to the reproduction of power. Things could not be any other way. Slavery was not a self-reproducing system; it presupposed unequal power relations. Long before their connection in production, slaves and masters were united through a private, culturally legitimated power relationship. In other words, before he or she became property, the slave was the captive of another man. For this reason, escapes and quilombos, though typical strategies of resistance to slavery, were not only direct attacks on property: They were extreme political acts whose very existence as possibilities restricted the master's reach, guaranteeing slaves a small yet crucial space from which they could make demands. We must not forget that slavery prevailed for four centuries in the Americas – fully four times as long as universal emancipation. In many ways, the slave past is still greater than the free present. For this reason, though escapes and the establishment of communities of runaways constituted classical forms of resistance to slavery, their study may, in fact, teach us much about slavery's great relative stability.

We begin our analysis with the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), a region highly integrated into the international market for tropical products. In 1789 there were 65,000 slaves in the region and 15,000 in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone. Thirty years later, these numbers had increased to 150,000 and 40,000 respectively. The trade in African slaves explains this growth.