Research Update, March 2011
During the last year or so I have been analyzing the internal economy of Paraense slaves in sugar and cacao plantations. This consists of the economic activities the slaves did for their own profit, like cultivating their own grounds and orchards, or working for wages. This study is part of my dissertation, where I am analyzing how Paraense slaves and maroons transited from slavery to freedom, and how they defended their autonomy as peasants in the decades after abolition. In this short entry I will enunciate some of my findings so far.
In the first place, because the produce of Paraense plantations was remarkably varied, the slaves engaged in the production and collections of multiple items, both manufactured and not. In the aftermath of the Cabanagem revolt plantations using slave labor were one of the few agents capable of satisfying the multiple needs of the regional economy. This is what the structure of exports in the first two decades after Cabanagem shows: plantation produce, like cacao, rice, sugar, cotton, and manioc flour played an important role in the economic recovery of the region after the turmoil of the revolutionary years. Therefore, the slaves practiced multiple economic activities, a very useful lesson for those who had the project of eventually becoming free.
In the second place, through the analysis of travel accounts and post-mortem inventories, a methodology suggested in the past by historians like Ciro Cardoso and Barbara Weinstein, I have shown how Paraense slaves had the opportunity of cultivating manioc grounds, occasionally engaging in wage labor, hunting nearby forests, and surprisingly, extracting rubber. This activity requires taping hevea trees scattered in the forest for long periods of time, which does not sound as an activity characterized by close supervision. These are activities that speak of a high degree of autonomy, and indeed this is the big picture emerging from the study of Paraense slavery in the second half of the 1800s.
- “Manufacture of india rubber shoes,” from Sketches of Residence and Travels in Brazil (1845). The man sitting on the bench
- is intended to be an acculturated Indian, the one standing on his left a black slave, and the one tapping
- a tree, a white colonist.
Finally, two historical forces eroded the institution of slavery in Pará. On the one hand, the slaves’ bid for freedom as expressed in the development of their internal economy and other elements. It is clear that the slaves’ social and economic life resembled that of peasants well before abolition, sometimes almost leading them to enjoy a de facto freedom. On the other hand, the gradual process of emancipation spreading across Brazil eventually arrived to this Northern state, although chattel slavery did not collapse here as easily as one might have foreseen based on the quantitative importance of this institution. Paraense masters stubbornly clung to their slaves until approximately 1885, and new slaves may have entered the state between 1871 (when the Free Womb Law was promulgated) and that year. In sum, the internal economy of the slaves played a significant role in wearing down the basis of the slaveholding regime.
