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Race and Social Control in Independent Brazil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
Historians of the age of revolution have often pointed out the contradictions inherent in the preservation of slavery within political structures self-defined as liberal. In Latin America many a nineteenth-century apologist stymied the question by citing the countervailing inviolability of property rights as justification for the continued bondage of slaves to their masters; but what, then, explains the discriminatory treatment of free blacks and mulattoes under nominally liberal regimes? Within free society no such ideological impasse can be identified, yet an analogous, if informal, subordination of the rights of the free colored is amply documented. And the analogy may be extended to include the free poor, regardless of color. At this point matters of race and class overlap, raising important questions about social relations and policies that cannot be answered by reference to formal ideology alone.
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References
1 See, for example,Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975);Google ScholarMorgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).Google Scholar
2 Recent interest in race relations has generated a number of studies dealing with free blacks in the New World: Cohen, David W. and Greene, Jack P. (eds.), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore, 1972);Google ScholarConrad, Robert, ‘Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818’ Hispanic American Historical Review, 53:1 (02. 1973), 50–70;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDegler, Carl, Neither Black nor White. Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971).Google Scholar For comparative purposes, see Berlin, Ira, Slaves without Masters. The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974);Google ScholarHandler, Jerome S., The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore, 1974).Google Scholar
3 Race is only one of the topics that have been neglected for the early imperial years. The more spectacular events leading to abolition (1888) have tended to draw the attention of students toward the end of the empire and give the erroneous impression that race was little thought of in the earlier period. Artur Ramos's early study of black history in Brazil ignores the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries almost entirely in order to jump directly from the seventeenth century runaway slave community of Palmares to abolition: O Negro na Civilizaçāo Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1971), vol. 1. Thomas Skidmore's valuable work on racial attitudes in Brazil likewise concentrates on the late imperial and national periods: Black into White. Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
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40 Such distribution of ‘Africanos livres’, which amounted to an illicit form of slavery, was common in Brazil between 1831 and 1850. Conrad, ‘Neither Slave nor Free’, passim; for the case of Rocha, see Cardim, Elmano, Justiniano José da Rocha (Sāo Paulo, 1964), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar
41 Interestingly enough, Rebouças's concern was not primarily with the general labor shortage that would follow the end of the slave trade, but, more parochially, with the destructive effects that the cessation of the traffic would have on the market for Bahian tobacco and cane liquor in Africa. His plans, proposed on two occasions during the 1840s, were never approved. Rebouças, Antônio P., Recordaçōes, 1, 380–1 (Speech of 11 01. 1843); 11, 236–43 (Speech of 10 June 1846). On racial solidarity, see also, Degler, Neither Black nor White, p. 84.Google Scholar
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43 ‘O Sr. Antonio Carlos e os Mulattoes’, in O Brazil, 11 Sept. 1841.Google Scholar
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47 Ibid., p. 48.
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58 Francisco Belisário Soares de Sousa, O sistema eleitoral do Brasil, como funciona, como tem funcionado, como deve ser ref ormado (Rio de Janeiro, 1872).Google Scholar
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