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Slave Economy and Society in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, Brazil in 1830
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Luna, Francisco Vidal Klein, Herbert S. |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | The current analysis of slave society in Brazil has involved a rethinking of the traditional plantation dominated model, with a new stress on the wide dispersion of slaves among whites and non-whites and their involvement in a lively internal economy as well as in extractive industries. This general picture is confirmed in a detailed analysis of the economy and slavery practised in the two major provinces of Minas Gerais and São Paulo in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Slaves were held in small units and they could be found in every region and occupied in every major economic activity. In some regions there was even positive growth rates of the resident slave population despite the massive arrival of Africans. Finally we find women and free coloured as significant slave-owners, with the latter especially concentrated in the trades. In the last thirty years there has emerged in Brazil a new understanding of the slave society organised in the colonial and imperial periods, especially in relation to how slave labour was used. These new studies of slave-ownership and of slave labour have questioned the traditional vision of Brazilian slavery proposed by Gilberto Freyre in his work on the sugar estates of the Northeast, which argued for the model of the large slave plantation. That dominant vision began to be challenged in the 1980s with studies which showed that small slave-owners dominated the colonial extractive economy of Minas Gerais in the colonial and imperial period. How could one justify the large plantation model as the norm when the majority of slave-owners in Minas owned less than five slaves and controlled a large share of the labour force? In fluvial gold mining of eighteenth-century Minas Gerais it was such small slave-owners who dominated, not the imagined miner with hundreds of Francisco Vidal Luna is Professor of Economics at the Universidade de São Paulo. Herbert S. Klein is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University. 1 In the decade of the 1980s numerous studies were published on ownership of slaves in Minas Gerais appeared by Francisco Vidal Luna. See his Minas Gerais : Escravos e senhores. (São Paulo : USP, Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, 1981) ; ‘Estrutura da Posse de Escravos em Minas Gerais (1718), ’História Econômica : Ensaios Econômicos (São Paulo, 1983), pp. 25–41; ‘Estrutura da Posse de Escravos em Minas Gerais (1804), ’ in Iraci del Nero da Costa (ed.), Brasil História Econômica e Demográfica. Série Relatórios de Pesquisa (São Paulo, 1986), pp. 157–72, as well as Francisco Vidal Luna and Iraci del Nero da Costa, ‘Demografia Histórica de Minas Gerais, ’ Revista Brasileira de Assuntos Polı́ticos, vol. 58 (1984), pp. 15–62. J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 36, 1–28 f 2004 Cambridge University Press 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X03007053 Printed in the United Kingdom |
| Starting Page | 1 |
| Ending Page | 28 |
| Page Count | 28 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1017/S0022216X03007053 |
| Volume Number | 36 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://web.stanford.edu/~hklein/Luna-Klein_SP-Minas_1830_JLAS_2004.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X03007053 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
