A Slave's Place, a Master's World. Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil“Tue Buack Amanmic General Editor: Polly Rewt, The Open University and University of stirling Series Advisers: Caryl Phillips, novelist; David Dabydeen, Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick; Vincent Carretta, Professor of sh, University of Maryland; Angus Calder, writer the cultural and theoretical parameters of the Black Atlantic world are explored and treated critically in this timely series. It offers students, Scholars and general readers essential texts which focus on the inter national black experience. The broad scope of the series is innovative and ambitious, treating literary, historical, biographical, musical and visual arts subjects from an interclisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. “The books address current debates on what constitutes the Black Atlantic, both geographically and theoretically. They include anthologized primary material and collections of seminal critical value to courses on the African Giaspora and related subjects. They will also appeal more widely 0 a feadership interested in biographical and other material that presents scholarship accessiby. Also published in the series: ‘Alasdair Pettinger (editor), Always Elsewhere: Travels ofthe Black Atlantic James Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797 Pail E. Lovejoy (editor), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery james Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora A SLAVE’S PLACE, A MASTER’S WORLD Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil NANCY PRISCILLA NAROContinuum ‘The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEL 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 First published 2000 © Nancy Priscilla Naro 2000 [All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be repreduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or Mnechanical, including photocopying, recording or any Information storage or recicval system, without permission in svriting from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data ‘A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-5295-7 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Naro, Nancy. : “a slave's place, a master’s world: fashioning dependency in rural Brazil/Nancy Priscilla Naro, ‘emt. — (The Black Atlantic) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-0-8264-5295~7 (he.) 1 Slavery-—Brazil-Psychological aspects. 2, Power (Social sciences) —Brazil—History. 3. Brazil—Rural conditions, {| Agriculture—Economic aspects —Brazil--History. 5, Ageiculeural laborers Brazil-—History. 1. Series HTL126.N37_ 1999 306.3'6210981-—de21 9943275 cp wdon Contents List or Fiounes Li or Tanuss viii Aexnowievcenenrs x | Thr Prasistence oF Amica in Post-rMANCIFATION Braz 1 Human merchandise 3 The persistence of Africa 4 Cultital dismissal 7 2 Onoxne me Waoeeness 15 Two towns 18 Distant origins ofa bitter bean 20 The reign of coffee 22 The teyional drift of the Rio de Janeiro provincial population, 1840 23 layos and slave ownership 27 Harnessing the wilderness: refashioning the land and the landscape 30 Displacement ot incorporation in Vassouras: slaves, foodstuffs and coffee 34 Alternative agensdas: Rio Bonito 3T Coffee in abundance: food in short supply 40 Hoi wilderness to occupation: fazendas, slaves and coffee 43 9) Fras Sects ano Sociat Retarions: Tat Great Houst, Stave Quivnrins, Fits ano Sis 50 Cotlee fazentas 50 Onjanicing, the landscape: fazenda layouts st Hierarchical social relations: the great ho 32 The spatial dimensions of social complementarity 31 ‘Ambiguous spaces and social bound veran jes: guest quarters and The slave quarters: physical incorporation, soclal excluston The terrace {hye fells: changing yoncler ratios Jexween the senzala and the great house sitios jimall farmy4) Mastens ano Staves: AutHonity an Contnot 90 The case of Emerenciana’s children: legal bridge to freedom 90 Slave family units 93 Slave occupations 96 . . cane ad Sl ae 98 List of Figures Masters and slaves 99 ‘Women and families: the changing nature of the rural population 101 Land and inheritance: the ideals and illusions of freedom 105 Passing os free 110 Ambiguity and controversy over emancipation 3 Constraints on the emancipation process 116 5 Fasnionine Frusvow: Privare Inrenists, Pusuic Sewents 127 Persistent beliefs 127, Public restrictions on slaves 128 J Settlement map of the province of Rio de Janeiro, 1868 18 Slave punishments and resistance 130 2 Indigenous encampment 25 From the fazenda to the courthouse 133 ¥ Hlarly great house 54 Moral authority 136 4 Hormer residence of the Bardo of Tingud in Vassouras, Rio de Transition at a gradual pace 138 Janeiro, Brazil 56 Brazilian captives 139 * Hntrance and fagade of the front of the great house of the Fazenda Lavradores and joraleiros 40 Hhon Sorte, Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 56 Manumission and the obstacles to freedom in Rio Bonito and Vassouras 141 6 Slave quarters 66 Changing landscapes: redoubled resistance 143 Mave quarters. 67 autenignaene 44 Interior of the Fazenda do Governo 68 Quilombos: Fueling freedom from the fazenda 4s 9 Hazenda de Santa Anna in Minas Gerais 6 10 Wotkers in the field 7 6 Tue Transition ro Fate Lanoun 133 H Poor family at home 30 Planter options: 155 EU 130, Poxt-emancipation rural society 158 From slaving to farming 159 Labour atrangemenis 159 Unduring bondage 162 Workers aplenty but nobody to farm 163 Migration 164 Customary tights: non-negotiable claims 168 Citzenship as avesas 169 Involuntary labour 169 wt 179 104 190 208List of Tables 2.1. Bavilian sugar and coffee exports, 1821-40 2.2 Provluction, export and price of coffe, province of Rio de Janeiro, 1840-60 2.5 Cuaboclo population of Rio de Janeiro province, by county, 1840 2.4 Free population of Rio de Janeiro province, by county, 1840 2.5. Slave population of Rio de Janeiro province, by county and by colour, 1840 2.6 Average nominal slave prices, by year, 1850-87 2.7, Population of Vassouras, 1850 2.8 Land distribution in four Vassouras parishes, 1854-6 2.9. Population of Rio Bonito, 1850 2.10 Land concentration in lowland and highland municipios, 1854-6 3.1 Analysis of population in selected coffee-export and internal-market mumicipos in Rio de Janeiro province, 1872 3.2 Slave population of Vassouras parishes, by sex, 1850 and 1872 3.3 Slave population of Vassouras parishes, by colour, 1850 and 1872 3.4. Slave population of Rio Bonito parishes, by colour, 1850 and 1872 3.5 4 Slave population of Rio Bonito, by sex, 1850 and 1872 4.1. Slave values as percentage of total property values, postmortem inventories, Rio Bonito and Vassouras, 1850-85 4.2. Slave population of Vassouras and Rio Bonito, by cotour, 1850 and 1872 4.3. Slave population of Vassouras and Rio Bonito, by sex and colour, 1872 4.4. Female population of the province of Rio de Janciro, by colour, free and slave status, 1850 45. Slave population of Vassouras and Rio Bonito, by sex, 1850 and 1872 4.6. Female population of Vassouras and Rio Bonito, 1850 and 1872 4.7, White and non-white population (slave and! free) of Vassouras, Rio Bonito and the court city and province of Rio cle Janeiro, 1872 4.8 Provincial population of ingénuos, by region ad municipio, 1872-7 19 2 a 26 27 23 30 36 38 39, 6 76 7 78 DD 92, 95, 96 102 102 103 103 4 Ma 1 a a sand Rio’ 150 and 1872 Hiveilin sugar and coflee exports, 1856-85 Yourly nvortyuige towns, Ranco do Brasil to five municipios, 1871-82 Population af Rio Bonito, Vassouras and Rio de fan 180, 1456,"1872, 1890 Douth records of Af Nie Bonito and Vassou ans, Brazilian ex-slaves andl children of slaves, 1889 Population of Vassouras, Rio Bonito and province/state of Rio de Janet, by colour, 1872 and 1890 wlathon of the city of Rio de Janeiro, 1890-1920 Iuazilian products in contos de réis and US dollars, 1920-1 140 Ms 14 160 164 165 166 181Acknowledgements Many persons and organizations in Brazil, the United States and the United Kingdom have contributed their time and knowledge to further this study along to completion. Without the cheerful support and encouragement of the Lewis, ‘Naro, Maciel, Sampson and, latterly, the Watts families, the challenges of a study that involved research in a number of different locations would have been much more difficult. Tam grateful to the staffs of various archives and libraries, including the Biblioteca Nacional, the Instituto Histérico e Geogrifico Brasileito, the Arquivo Nacional, the Arquivo Pablico do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, the Library Company in Philadelphia, the libraries of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia Uni- versity and Johns Hopkins University. lam particularly indebted to Sr Mario Luz of the Biblioteca Nacional and to Sr Bliseo of the Arquivo Nacional, who were not only generous with their time and extremely helpful in locating materials but were equally forthcoming in their assistance to the many students who accom- panied me on research visits. Equally deserving of an enormous vote of thanks are D. Mercedes Simées, owner of the Cart6rio Pilblico co Primeiro Oficio de Notas of Rio Bonito, and Professor Sénia Mota of the Faculdade Severino Sombra, who organized the Ordem dos Advogedos documentation centre in the Forum of ‘Vassouras. Both women generously provided working spaces for me and the students Ana Cristina de Souza Bougas, Flavio Giglio Barbosa, Margarete Pereira da Silva and Myriam Bessa, whose reading and evaluation of legal documents was facilitated by the neatly arranged and carefully classified postmortem inventories and court records. Maria Yedda Linhares has provided intellectual guidance for many years, both as a colleague at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and as a friend, and I dedicate this study to her in recognition of her contributions to historical research, Through Dona Yedda, I met and collaborated for many years with Ciro Flamarion Santana Cardoso, Robert Wayne Slenes, Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva, Isménia de Lima Martins, Eulilia Lahmeyer Lobo and the confident and inspired students and colleagues who participated in the seminars and con- ferences organized by the Historia Social de Agricultura of the Departamento de Histéria of the Universidade Federal Fluminense. To them, and to Joao Luis Ribeiro Fragoso, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Sheila de Castro Faria, Sidney — Sane ain nei sph hc en J ii nvdebted for stimulating discussions of data, theoretical interpretations and Witoriogtaphical tends. ‘The revisions to the historiography of Htaztl, and most Potioulity of Rio de aneito, are the fruits of their eames! efforts, creative Woiylhts andl dedicated research. Tam thankful also to the late Warten Dean, «0 Pinkiin Knigln, Robert Conrad, Steven Topik and Mary Karasch, who read early Versions of the first (wo chapters, and to Davie Watts, whose careful reading led Wo fevistons in dhe first draft of the entire manuscript. Mary Karasch worked HHjouph the materials with a fine-tooth comb and the final manuscript reflects her inohttul suggestions and judicious comments, Finally, my thanks go to supportive colleagues at King’s College and the Institute of Latin American Aivnliow of the University of London; to James Walvin for directing my attention 1\ this series; to Polly Rewt, the series editor; and to Philippa Hudson, Sandra Maijolies and Janet Joyce at Continuum for seeing it through to completion,In memory of Warren Dean The Persistence of Africa in - Post-emancipation Brazil ‘he marketplace was abuste: the large ‘Minas’ negeesses, with their Hveacldress in the shape of a muslin turban, with their faces full of scat and seams, having a chemise and a skirt with rules as their clothing, are squatted on mats, near their fruits and vegetables; at their sides are their boys and girls, in complete iwuity Children were fastened at the mother’s breast with a inige piece of striped cloth, passed two or three times around the bevlies, after having placed the child on their hips, feet and arms straddled! Al first reading, this description fitted the Sao Pedro market in Luanda, Angola, Whore I lived from 1971 to 1973. Yet, the book I was reading was not about Alvican matket-places and the writer was not travelling anywhere in Angola or Wining any marke in Central West Africa. Adéle Toussaint-Samson, a French faveller vo Brazil, was recalling her visit in the 1870s to the downtown market~ place of Praga XV, located on the Bay of Guanabara in urban Rio de Janeiro.’ Her hlwer vations offer today’s historians important insights into the social fabric and sijeot culture of the ety of Rio de Janeiro in the decade prior to the official sholltion of Brazilian chattel slavery on 13 May 1888. Toussaint-Samson docu- nents the persistence of African factal markings, the specific forms of headwe: Wom by the ‘Minas’ women, the hand-woven mats used for the display of foovlstufls and wares and the babies who were supported on their mother’s hips lvy multiple layers of cloth wound around her body, allowing for the unimpeded Inovenent of arms and hands. Most significantly there were young boys and girls ‘children and infants ~a family that may or may not have included a partner or ul, father or other kin. ousssint-Samson’s description of the market-place was a testimony to the uct shat move than chree centuries after the initial landings of enslaved Africans liv Brasil, theie presence was still visible. The bearers of traditions that their Jovebears carried in the ships’ holds, thedescendants of forced migrants, they had ‘outlived what historian Stuart Schwartz has termed a ‘deadly demography’. ThisA Slave’s Place, a Master's World ‘was a natural rate of decline fostered by the reliance on the Atlantic slave trade to replenish slave labour forces and to expand slave-based agriculture.’ From Maranhio to the coastal northeast, from the shores and hinterlands of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to the far south, and to the mining districts of Minas Gerais and Goids, slaves and chattel slavery were the labour mainstays of a system of unequal social relations that, under the plantation complex, harked back to the country's settlement and development.’ Individuals, clergy and government officials, bearing the sanctions of their respective patrons, religious orders and governments, privately appropriated large land-holdings and subjected captive labour to toil. According to David Eltis, and David Richardson, between 1660 and 1867, 10.1 million captive African people, carried in British, Portuguese and French ships, left Aftica to face lives of slavery in America.* Forty per cent, mainly from West Central Aftica, were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to their final destinations in Brazil by regular shiploads that averaged 300 slaves each until the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1850. Rio de Janeiro in the southeast and Salvador, Bahia, in the northeast were Brazil's major ports of destination for ships in the African trade. This crade expanded after 1808 when Brazilian ports were opened to international trade following the transfer of the Portuguese royal family and approximately 15,000 court members to Rio de Janeiro. The colonial port city became the centre of empire and, in Luiz Felipe de Alencastto's terms, ‘the civilizing pole of the nation’.’ The population of the urban core of the city expanded from 43,000 in 1799 t0 79,000 in 1821; the slaves represented 35 and 46 per cent of these totals, respectively.* At mid-century when the transatlantic slave trace was abolished, slaves accounted for over one-third (38 per cent) of the city’s population of 79,000." Two decades later, Brazil’s first national census of 1872 registered the decline of the slave population in the city of Rio de Janeiro to 18 per cent or 48,939 ofa total population of 274,972." In proportional terms, the court and the coflee-producing regions of southeast Brazil ~ Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Si0 Paulo and Espirito Santo with 32.3, 18, 18.7 and 27.5 per cent, respectively ~ effectively concentrated Brazil's slave population, outdistancing the traditional sugar-producing regions of the northeast where export proctuction had been concentrated since the early colonial period.” ‘The origins of the respective captives sent t0 Salvador and Rio de Janeiro was also different. Sixty per cent of the emigrants from the Bight of Benin went «0 Bahia, an entrepdtfor slaves who were then distributed to the city of Salvadorand. the Bahian hinterland, the provinces of Minas Gerais to the south and Pernam- buco and Amazonas to the north and northwest, Slaves introduced (o the port of Rio de Janeiro, where distribution was undertaken to supply slave markets in Minas Gerais, Sio Paulo andl areas further south, were mostly drawn from ports in West Central Altica, although one-fifth to one-q Africa, Her came from East The Persistence of Afri in Post-emancipation Brazil 3 Human merchandise In ll of Brazil's coastal ports recently arrived slaves shared a similar condition. In vilition to the irreparable emotional scars of separation from loved ones, the |hoviors of captivity also inflicted survivors of the crossing with emaciation, the wuld Luanda (scurvy) and loathsome itchy skin eruptions on the legs, feet and whles. In contrast to the assimilated and Brazilian-born slaves (ladinos) who Juosed them in the streets hawking wares, displaying ornate headgear and ‘changing shouts and greetings in the markets, newly arrived survivors of the ‘uunsatlantic crossing moved slowly through the streets or were cartied from the lhoac hes: where they had landed. Matnourished, traumatized and disoriented, ‘hwy were scantily clad, bereft of personal possessions and alienated from familiar \vouindings, shelter and food. The purveyors of African languages, customs, wes, belie, farming skils, trading, warringand culinary practices, and display- Ing liverse hairstyles and facial markings, they represented cultural traits that j)elsist in Brazilian culture to this day. But during slavery their chanted longings vin! qrievings for their ‘homelands’ were audible as they were taken through watown streets to slave depots to await their fate at the ‘crossroads’, Mary Narasch’s term for the urban slave markets in Brazil's coastal ports." ven after suspension of the transatlantic slave trade, the demand for slaves ‘ontinued unabated, Human pesas ‘pieces’, also ‘fragments’ were subjected to the merchandising of deft and devious vendors who were experts in the arts of, ‘Comoullage and cosmetics. Maladies were disguised, and physical defects that Were exposed during minute examination at public auction were played down. ices luctuated with the supply and demand of local markets, and the negotia- Hion between vendor and purchaser involved intense haggling over what each hrerceived to be the physical appearance, medical state, submissiveness and ‘nena astuteness of each slave in question. A process of examination, inspec- ‘lon, questioning, bargaining and price fixing juxtaposed prospective purchaser anil vendor in a verbal dual that would usually determine a slave's destiny to |niytal exploitation in the plantations, to service in the great houses of rural and wlan areas, tO navigation, skilled artisanry, trade and manual labour in the vets and port." ils of Rio de Janeiro’s urban labour market were competitive and «lective, Newspaper advertisements for slaves emphasized skills, appearance uwv{chuaracter-~‘a wetnurse with abundant milk’, ‘a skilful shoemaker, with a very vod body, about twenty years of age, with no vices or bad habits’, or ‘one who ns andl does laundry, another a baker and laundress, and the third also a |uindless, all with very good bodies and able 1o perform every kind of household Fear of collective mobilization by slaves from the same area led some prospective buyers to select slaves from different parts of Africa, but the over Hiding consideration was ot ability of slaves to execute menial, manual‘The persistence of Africa Three centuries of uninterrupted transatlantic trade (0 re-supply the plantations with bodies and spirits also replenished Africans and their offspring with cus: toms, religious practices, devotion to African deities, festivities, farming practices, martial arts, diet and linguistic ties that connected them to Africa through the water-borne journey.”” The persistence in fragmentary form or in their entirety of ancestral customs ~ lineage, kingship, and descent ~ attested to the continuity of a long-standing correspondence that Africans brought to Portu- ‘guese and Brazilian lifestyles. For Robert Wayne Slenes, slaves forged identities during captivity in Africa, in the holds of slavers and on plantations. In his analysis of the diverse meanings of the word malungu, the collective association of slaves with the shipboard experi- ence of the transatlantic crossing, he finds the genesis for slave boncling in the ‘New World context.” Philip Morgan advances a different argument. For him, the varied origins of ethnic identities contributed to strategies and survival tactics that enabled slaves to confront the issues and problems of their own enslaved status: “The cultures of slave-based communities were essentially new and owed more to the conditions that Africans encountered in America than to their upbringing in Aftica.”? Joseph Miller's view of fluid and permeable ethnic identities also endorses the adaptation, modification and invention that contrib- luted to the emergence of hybrid societies where ‘culture jostled and converged in combinations and permutations of dizzying complexity’? Slavery in the capital and court city of Rio de Janeiro, the port and hinterland of Salvador and, t0 a lesser degree, Séo Luis de Maranhio, Recife and the hinterlands, the mining and agricultural belts of Minas Gerais and the rural {fazendas (farming estates) of Sao Paulo vibrated to an African, albeit not uniform, pulse Africa's nations in America conveyed themselves through the facial hhead coverings, hairstyles and arrangements of dress and beads that layed openly in the streets, markets, homes and public gardens and Fountains." Rio de Janeiro was the favourite urban setting for foreign artists like ‘Thomas Ewbank, Jean Baptiste Debret and Johann Moritz Rugendas, who re- corded movement, flair and diversity in the dress of ambulant street and market vendors, in the outfits of slaves who accompanied elite families to church, inslave ‘omamentation, music and dance, and slave punishments in the public and private spaces of the city.** Depictions of scraggly, deformed and dishevelled semi-naked slaves engaged in vile and debasing menial tasks that included the carrying of water and the dumping of barrels of night-soil contrasted sharply with, clegantly attired and sensual street vendors (guitandeiras), prostitutes and domes tic slaves, whose images entertained the fashionable in European drawing, rooms."* Descriptions of slave women and their daily lives in the service of a master ot a mistress were also colourful entries in the diaries of travelling foreigners, whose readers would share their astonishment and horror at slave life African ations of d cial markings, dialects, dress and ornaments were external n eper customs, traditions and spiritual beliefs that defied the st exile and family fragmentation wrought by the institution of slavery. According jo May Karasch, tribal rituals, beliefs, tributes to Altican deitien, firming ul other martial arts, and the whole or Hremontes, the practice of capoeira Jutial maintenance ofjdietary habits enforced identification with Attica!” The Iainatyles, colourful beads, amulets, ribbons, shapes and uses of cloth, sears and jor testified to the local and tribal identities of slave qui jes on the pirants 10 Folly ornament inlets, donvestie servants and freed Africans, who were colourful fig jhubllc thoroughfares ofthe bustling port cities. European ladies anda thelr social status shunned the use of such accoutrements and frowned upon Vlave concubines whose lovers dressed them in European-style clothing, includ- Jj shoes, French and English stays and gowns, and gold jewellery that violated ‘livia, but rarely enforced, dress prohibitions for slaves."* Culinary and healing practices made use of African, indigenous Brazilian and J iopean knowledge of herbs, such as cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, rue, rosemary vl iy leaf, and their medicinal and dietary use, Indigenous Brazilian tribes who tinule-a drink from fermented sweet manioc root, called cain, for ritual purposes, found a counterpart in the African variant, alud.® Cabalistic brews were con- “acted int painkillers, poisons, abortion potions and stimulants. African slaves ‘nldled ginger, palm oil, malagueta peppers, coconut milk, or bacon fat to man- ‘ca mush and to maize dishes, introducing variety to the Brazilian dietary e, beans, sugar and, by the end of the eighteenth century, staples of manic, mi tice and coffee." Centuries of contact and religious indoctrination did little to endear master nul slave to one another. Nor did they blur distinctions between African spiritual hiclicfs and European religious practices. Roman Catholicism was the official tute religion, and Portuguese colonizers and the Church fathers carried it to the tnissions and settlements of Brazil, Portuguese Africa and Asia, The Catholic Cinurch regarded masters and slaves as equals in the sight of God but did not Hilicially condemn the enslavement of Africans, Captives were regarded as juinan beings with souls that were worthy of salvation and were given a rapid Cluistian baptism prior to their embarkation or, under colonial laws thar were in cilect until the 1840s, ata Catholic church where they were divided into groups icvording to the name they were to receive." Masters were expected to acquaint hhevly imported slaves with the fundamentals of Christian doctrine, baptism, vular attendance at Mass on Sundays and holy days, and rest from labour on those days, a task that was often assigned to virtuous or long-standing slaves, ‘who acted as godfathers to new slaves.” Under canon law, slaves were to be shatried in the Church and a married couple was not to be separated by theit tnaster, ‘The moral authority of the Church was, however, compromised by Jnonasteties, brotherhoods, charities, orphanages and clergymen who were tnembers of the slave-holding classes, beneficiaries of the plantation complex, Uelenders of slavery and the slave trade, and themselves practitioners of the tnrutality inherent in the institution. Church officials enjoyed the same benefits from slave-holding as laymen and purchased and sold slaves for personal as well as institutional service. Church and Church brotherhoods, such as the Bene e protection of slaves but the establishment ‘of social separation. The dietine Order, were committed to t by slaves of black relighous brotherhoods was indicpatroness o Virgin Ma In some instances, masters and slaves attended Mass together and plantation ‘masters stood as godparents at the baptism and marriage of their slaves. One of the rare descriptions of a slave wedding suggests, however, considerable leeway between priests’ formal adherence to Christian rituals and their actual treatment of black brothers of the faith. Described by a foreign visitor, the black bride in a white muslin dress and coarse white lace veil and the husband in a white linen suit were harshly treated by a Portuguese priest, who ordered them to kneel at the altar in a tone that ‘was more suggestive of cursing than praying’. Having uttered his blessing he ‘hurled an amen at them, slammed the prayer-book down, on the altar, whiffed out the candles, and turned the bride and bridegroom out of the chapel with as little ceremony as one would have kicked out a dog’. ‘The encouragement of slaves and ex-slaves to partake in the Catholic rituals of baptism, marriage and burial may have tied in with aims of parish priests to weaken dissimilar religious and cultural traditions by bringing slaves into the ‘Church through high-spirited festivals. The following description of slave cele- brations that appropriated a Catholic feast day suggests that, collectively and individually, slave participants sidelined any ofits religious aims or components. AAs described by Maximilian 1, who attended the festival of the Church of Our Lady of Bomfim in Salvador, Bahia, in 1860, the participants who were plied with cachaga (sugarcane whisky) celebrated in a theatrical manner, paying little heed to the solemn spiritual and religious nature of the festivity: pany of them, Our Lady of the Rosary, was a black invocation of the and was among the most revered by brotherhood members." To a good Catholic the whole of this proceeding could not but appear most blasphemous; for at this festival the blacks mingled heathen notions to a most improper extent with their ideas of pilgrimage .,. All moved hither and thither in a confused mass. Here, were two acquaintances greeting and kissing each other; there, two negro slaves from distant parts of the town were shaking hands; here a matron shouted ‘Good day’, over the heads of those around her, to an approaching Amazon; there groups of people had collected and were chattering merrily over the events and love-adventures of this happy day. Mirth and unrestrained happiness reigned everywhere: one could see that it was a long-looked-for festival, at which the negroes felt quite at hhome ... The yellow-complexioned priest was going through the ‘ceremony of the mass (I cannot call it celebrating mass), as though he were giving an oration at this public festival. [could no longer doubt; we were in the church; the large, mirthful, dancing-hall was a Brazilian temple of God, the chattering negroes were baptized Christians, were supposed to be Catholics, and were attending mass the dismayed visitor, accustomed to the solemnity and ritual of a European Catholic Mass, viewed the scene as an unsettling mayhem. Yet his description autested {0 the transformation of a Catholle celebration into a festive social vsion, An early qwentieth-century Angolan tntellectinal, Antonie de: Assi {inv his navel, O seqveda da morta, set bn Dono, Angola, i 1900, that Juitor, argu Adicans remained tre to their own tradi wale to them." Alrican-derived ceremonies were led by African priests ancl priestesses but anbraced celebrants for whom the rituals sometimes complemented and at other {inves compromised traditional Catholic beliefs, Despite Catholic cleries’ associa- mn informed slave celebrations with pagan beliefs and diabolic Jnuctives, slaves held to cosmic identities that originated over the ocean. Yemanjé, a Yoruba deity who reigned over the seas, Yansa, Oxossi, Oxalé and Oyun formed a pantheon of spirits for descendants of West Afiicans and West Contial Alticans who continue t© this day to invoke spirits from different homelands in Africa.” Karasch has argued on the basis of data for the city of Rio dle Janeiro that in that multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment, slave teligions were essentially African and especially Central African. The enslavement of Africans from many different regions brought to the plantations of the Americas local beliefs and devotions that were fused into shaved linguistic codes, fictive kinship, gestures, languages, signs, rituals and practices, Some of which had counterparts among indigenous socives, The Hania, mainly Kimbundu words, alunga, camondongo, quilombo, quitandeira, qui- Ji inune, clan andl mama are but samplings of the hundreds of Aftican forms that continued to inform the Brazilian Portuguese vernacular in the aicrmath of emancipation.” al religious values ancl bert Cathie the spirits Cultural dismissal saves brought the many peoples of Aca to Brall and, as Mary Karasch, Fiuando dS and Carls Eugenio Lbano Soares have shown, the sret tin, daily active, language and se of omamentation~ beads, rib ve fates and Banners which fncion a6 deniers of Fal soups, ‘Ninos celebrant of individual taste attested to cultura, social and about Jesttecs dat marked the ity of Rio de jancir with a signatire of ural orn tet ek capity Whereas elder slaves cried om religious traditions and ss sation to sve chen that seins refed the belt of isrnos were Ignorant ef the many peoples and cultures of Afi Nor was any Tlnlon of Abie a focus or concern of ninetcent-centry rain cheat, Meany and printed musi works Apart fromm Queen Ana Neinga Mand Neots af Mata, who rule in he severe century and whose triumphant tte were ail recalled by slaves of Bryn th nnecenta cer, those rea “init of aly European raver, aa cabs pidgin tongues that tad assed spectators atthe popular theatre of slatesrycentry Lisbon ioused lie curiosity among slave holding Bazan icona wo ied portrayal of Balan Indians in Das Gomes's opera © Guarani (1887). Joe ce Alencar’ nove, tran, (2468), the unfinishedwork, Os Timbiras (1857) andl the romantic paintings of ‘noble savages’ that embellished public buildings and the salons of promnin ‘men, the African heritage was underplayed or ignored. B reputation for courage, valour and nobleness that their African slave counterparts were denied. ‘African’ was synonymous with ‘slave’, although Brazilian-born cteoles and Indians had also been subjected to slavery." David Brookshaw has ‘observed that in José de Alencar’s novel, Til (1872), all slaves were depicted as so submissive by nature that they dampened the independent spirit in the Indian, Jodo Fera.* Non-white and white Brazilian writers and playwrights perpetuated the social myth of slave setvility, docility and submissiveness, ignoring decisive battles, resplendent kingships, technical advancements in metalwork, the tales, tradi tions and music of Africa, In the Brazilian plays of Martins Pena from the 1830s and 1840s, the social hierarchy as perceived by the master class highlighted the ‘worlds of authority and wealth that prevailed over the poor freemen, freecmen and slaves. Slaves were given no names and were listed last on the playbill, reflecting a perception of them as brutish, jgnorant and gullible beings.** ‘Yer there were exceptions, as revealed in the timely novel O tronco do pé, set in Vassouras and published by José de Alencar in 1871. The portrayal of the elderly slave as a bearer of cultural traditions and practices centred on Pai (Father) Benedito, described as a forlorn African slave whose long-time companion addresses him as calunga, in reference to the shared experience ofthe sea journey fiom Aftica, A mystique surrounded Pai Benedito, who lived in a cabin set apart from the slave quarters on a promontory overlooking the Pataiba River. It was said that he held a pact with the Devil and every night the souls of the underworld ‘who frequented his cabin were invited to accompany the drumming and ‘dance the night long a furious samba under the aged Ipé tree’. In an immense cavern in the tree trunk, littered with crosses, a figure of the Virgin Mary, a small image of Saint Benedict, charms made of sticks, amulets, dried rue branches, human bones, rattlesnake rattles and teeth, Pai Benedito communicated with spirits." A trusted slave of long-standing service to the fazenda, he guarded a secret regarding hhis master and the descent to ruin of the once-prominent Fazenda of Nossa ‘Senhora do Boqueirio. This secret was vital to elevating the social standing of Mario, a young man who lived on the fazenda with his widowed mother. Pai Benedito, a minority among Brazil’s thousands of captives, became empowered by knowledge of the people and events surrounding the fazenda. Like the ancient tree, he was held in regard and awe by other slaves and by his master’s family for his healing powers. Alencat’s novel not only highlighted the importance of slaves in long-standing service to the wellbeing of a rural estate's operation but also focused upon the interrelationships that complemented the slave-master relationship on the great Jazentas belonging to the senhorial class. The novel revealed that underlying the rigid vertical social hierarchy of planter-class society were multiple codes of social interaction in the rural milieu that attested 10 a ‘hierarchy of complementarity’ within the society as a whole, Ihave taken anthropologist Roberto da Matta’s tse of this term in his analysis of relations in the house and in the street, as one that ‘enables one ‘to “read! the extensive system of rituals as evid n indians, nce of a society in of itself in differentiating, betwee ‘owners ani! slaves, property-owners and Land: sand theit lifestyles, Eseek reflections Jeate over differentiated vision Iilentiches annd strateyien of sh Jenw farmers, skilled and unskilled labe " 0 lifevent ‘social values and codes that auygest complementary and iter Fluted social relations instead of unilateral strategies or exclusive forms ol sae raat cota aeompanted the gruel realization of rural soley as cultural landseape, which was in turn derived from the natural Jandscape. ‘ jodification is evaluated through the physical and population changes that the Paar eee of cate Ugh Oy ba rovtie of Kio de ]meloa "De (iunieipios) in the hinterlands of the province of Rio de Janeiro illustrate S ‘extends along the Paraiba do Sul River from Sao Paulo to the Atlantic a high-grade coffee favoured the development of a local economy that bene! ed extensive connections in the corridors of the imperial court of Rio de Janeiro. longer available by the 1840s and planters who held large holdings ceo aes and forested land on their fazendas had, by the 1870s, either sold or. ‘divided their slavery, as indicated by the increase in demand for slaves over ten years se was among the Paraiba Valley towns to suffer reversals at the outset ‘of the A Tne accond mune, Rio Bonito, previously unstudied i leat in the lowlands 60 kilometres northeast of Nite. Stes of transition from slave to free labour in. Rio Bonito, So Gongalo, Araruama and Capivary are recent anc have drawn attention to feot-pradcing munis and thee importa e, The towns in the Restinga region we and regional production and trade, The town ; Sve lie, acd prc, net and the wading networks that served Guanabara Bay, the provincial capital of Niterdt and theimperial court of Riv de Janeiro, over the age of ten steadily declined, replaced by an equally steady influx af free and freed non-white migrants in search of available farming land.” Rio Bonito's smal elite enjoyed limited ties to the international markets and to the political Centres of power in the court. In contrast to Vassouras, an open social milieu developed that incorporated rather than excluded local labour. The dliversifiea, {on of agricultural crops and production for local and regional markets offset the impact ofthe crises that affected the highlands coffee economies in the 1880s, In contrast with Vassouras, the municipio of Rio Bonito represents a different transition process and one that was more in keeping with the rest of Brazil Both municipios were rural but I have approached them less as territorial ‘categories of social space than as illustrative cases ofthe process of rurality. Thave taken rurality, in Sarah Whatmore’s terminology, to be centred on social and Political struggles and the ways in which they impacted on rural identity and environment.” The process of transition is thus evaluated with a view to the Political and social struggles that involved the employment of different strategies and tactics by the planter class, slaves, fee cultivators and others in providing an infrastructure for, and shaping, a free labour marker. Neither Vassouras nor Rio Bonito existed at the end ofthe eighteenth century but, as discussed in Chapter 2, by 1840 both towns were undergoing a rapid rovess of development as claims and settlement displaced indigenous societies and ushered in a change to the landscape that drew on slave labour for planters, traders, merchants and small-scale cultivators, nvelved in disputes over rights to land. Chapter 3 highlights the coffee fazenda and its emergence at the hub of the nineteenth-century rural hinterland society in southeast Brazil. The fazenda Wasa rural estate, the nineteenth-century equivalent of the northeastern sugar- producing mill orengenko that has provided a basis for monographs and studies of slavery, slave revolts and transition to free labour in that region.” I relate the development of the fazenda to the acquisition of land and the ownership of involuntary slave labour. De jure claims by landowners and slave-owners to property are juxtaposed with de facto claims based on customary rights to land and produce by slaves, ex-slaves, landless farmers and planters. The dynamics of hierarchical complementarity are also explored as racial and gender empower- ment, often secretly acquired and displayed in informal, coded and disguised ways in the great house, The organization of labour, the impact of gender and the bearing of colour and social stancling are discussed with reference to Vassouras, where the prominent and prosperous rural estates of the Paraiba Valley were distinguished from their smaller and more modest counterparts. Vassouras is, in tum, compared with Rio Bonito in terms of the spatial dimensions of its great houses, grounds, fields and forests and the social uses and areas of negotiation ‘that challenged the rigid social hierarchy of the fazenda and brought to bear the Dresence of the public sphere on the private world of the rural estate Chapter 4 focuses on domestic and field slaves, drawing on man and court cases to highlight the difficule paths thy smaller production units pu In the Restinga region, the slave population nission data slaves on the fazendas anc ued to freedom. The findings suggest that African slaves of long-standing service and their offyprlng held privileged positions on lan had iter oat heb of fe non-western de oss of ll fo fo! pron ayo al anya tee ad a si Mint pie ot ed in Brazil, this practice gradually developed during, thatthe paaange om waning i a rie fxumpler inthe Caribe later | duardo Silva identified in Bri ihe ranstion proces io stray ah ane he customary right to land use was an impor labour landacape Heat aad Wr eadonn was achieved, Similar practices in both towns suggest that the pasge Ree lized slaves from the ownership of property and from the ree if possessions in land from their masters. ie dal cor ee ay rere ft e and ex-slave population in all areas of So aa tated the buns betwen bondage and edn cane canted onthe tomy ss fe fat ess fa a Chap Sash nd ancora ie very a thc vansunteaysla wt nro he vo Was, where planters resisted towns [argue that slaves in Vassou aes 1 ou wl the T8805 fashioned feed conan! wy th i volved African stave leadership, adopting strategies that saleced the inant in struggles of the abolitionist ca Coated pie dene Tee icra i orpieis ates one usec a 1/3 vl ims to freedom. In Rio Bonito, sh LE ET artut 1s that increasingly focused public ihe creallzation of our market that nt stage Inthe the public sphere ofthe courts in sry rs Seana the njustices of slavery. In this tov, howeve the population cmaed with te maton of he fie boar mark 4 lux of non-white freed and free farmers in search of farmin Eee eees io Bonito provided an infrastructure for eran ting na ee i ara i — ety that was based on incorpor oe telus though farly-basel Faring, tae, fod pre networks (Chapter 6 rises the insu ci. reedom fiom bondage it 1888 t na a a cl = property to being citizens of the Brazilian national state, F Aan oe Btn slaves woud retro thee Holand, Aloud ER carRtave iia eh atoms and practices in the torn slaves had learned about Atiean cu brates inthe enship and natonal of post-emancipaton ctienshi i nsformed all slaves from being tle quarter, ew would seek aif of freedom In Aca, chocsng Ins fal ‘Afro-Brazl st-emaneipation “patria Bx: stem p he fashioning, fi flayes who remained in freedom in rural Brazil crew on customary ties to Ianul kin as they shaped rurality through the formation ofan identity with familiar places of work ane! residence. Emancipation officially changed the status of slaves from ‘non-citize although literacy requirements, prosecution for vagrancy and begging, kovernment repression of Afro-Brazilian spiritual centres and meagre government and private incentives to advance education, small farming, technical training and untisanty excluded ex-slaves from any collective exercise of political and social «citizenship. Post-emancipation society provided for the incorporation of ex-slaves limo the ranks of the rural labour force through tenantry, sharecropping, day labour an comestic labour but limited any upward mobility through dependency ties between the landless and the landed, between the poor and the prosperous, Appealed eviction cases and land records from both towns suggest that legal ‘constraints, like literacy, posed restrictions on the exercise of citizenship through «lectoral participation. The data suggest that citizenship was reached the wrong Way round, oF in Portuguese ds avessas, as @ response to diverse modernizing ‘yeniday involving issues of land occupation that are still unresolved today. to Notes |. Adele Toussaint Samson, A Parisian in Bazit (Boston: James H, Earle, 1891), pp. 40-1 2. ‘The marketplace was infront of the imperial palace that is today’s Praga XV. ‘.-Skuar D, Schwwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (Urbana: University of lina Press, 1992), pr. Philip D, Curtin defines the plantation complex as ‘the economic and political order «entring on slave plantations in the New World tropics (The Rie an Fal of ibe Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Carbrcge University Press, 1930), p. D0). %. avid Elis and David Richardson, Routes to Slaery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality inthe ‘lane Slave trade (Londons Prank Cass, 1987), p, 2, See also Paul E. Lovejoy (ed), Afcans 1 onl Sttis in Slavery andthe Slave Trade Essays in Honor of Philp D. Crtn (Madson: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), and with Nicolas Rogers (eds), Unive Labour in the Development of the Acante Worl, special edition of Sleveryand Abolition (1994), (iis and Richardson, Routes, p. 6. The average numberof slaves per ship is taken from Herbert 8, Klein and Stanley Engerman, ‘Long-term trends In Altican mortality jn the ‘wsnsatlantic slave crad’, in Elis and Richardson, Roates, p36. ‘is Felipe de Aleneasto, "Via privada e ordem publica no Império’, in Laiz Felipe de Aleneasto (ei), Impriosa corte ea madersdas nacional, vo, 2 of Fernand A. Novas (ed), isiva da vide privat no Brasil, 4 vols (S30 Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998), . 13, thi, pp. 13-14, 9 thal, pod 10. The 1872 data were revised by the Laboratério de Especalizagio de Dalos ~ Centro lero de Anise e Planejamento (CEBRAP), S40 Paulo, 1997. See Alencastro (ed), ‘Vida privadae ordem publica no kmpério’, Tables Band 10. The percentages of slaves in the northeastern provinces were: 12.1 percent i Bahia; 10.4 Per cent in Pernambuco; 12.8 per cent in Sergipe; 10.2 per cent in Alagoas: 44 percent in ear 5.7 percent in Paratha; and 5.5 per cent in Rio Grande ca Norte. See Alencasto (ca) Impéio, Table 10, p. 479. 12. Elis and Richardson, Rowes, p 7 1%, James Henderson, A'Hisary of che Breil; Comprising tts Geography, Commerce, Coloniuton, ‘Aurigina inhabitants, ete (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme an Bown, 1421) p. 78 ‘One cure was a nightly wash in warm water and cane whisky (achaya), Sarna, or acablow as | commonly ealled today, war one such Itey and contagious akin disease 9 (ol) ls, see Aloncasv, "Via priv eon plea no type’, bn A Inpri,p.92, . Mary Kane, Sheff Ri 1987), 929.10. Ahi, pp 0%; Robe B. Conrad, Childe of Gs ie ( oss TORY, cue 1.9, pp 4-52 Konan, Slr ie Ch Conta, Cite, doe Manolo Gara Fiventine has highlighted the es xyamong the poor fee eva on doef he icapenatvenene and abundance of alae oe ito Se on "intas na:una itr do ri tno de xaos ete a Afra o Rode Janie (clos Vile X18) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995) Inn Thonnon, Africe an Ans che Making of the Ada World, 1400-1680 (Cam vile: Cate Univesity Press, 1992), Part2,Chs 7, 8 and 10 iter W. Snes," "Malungu, ngoma ver”: Africa encaberta e descoberta po Bras Cader Aw Fscravatura (Luanda: Minstrio da Cultura, 1998). Hilip Morgan, “The cultural implfetions ofthe Adantic slave trade: Afican regional Cwiyins, Amercan destinations abd New World development in Eis and Richardson, fates, p13 Head Richardson, Rowe, p. 13,136, M2 Karaic, Slave if, Table 3.3, p62. Jem Bit Dies Vig rece iri or Bl Trane and edd by Spo Millec (Sio Paulo: Martins, 1954); Joao Mauricio Johann Moritz] Rugendas, Viagon ror ura dors (So Paul Martins, (1940), 1967); Thomas Eobank, Lien Baal (New York Harper & Broters, 1856), pp- 84, 101, 111,114,116, 117,223,277 Koller M. Lavine, ‘The Faces of Savery videw Frida: Universit of Miami, 1954). van, Sle Life Ch. 8; Thornton, fica and Africans, Part 2, Chis 7,8 and 10. AvJR Russell Wood, The Black Manin Slarey ax Freedom is Clo! Bruit (London ‘Macmillan, 1982); Karasch, Slave Life, p. 223 luis de Camara Cascud, Antolgi ds alnentydo no Brasil (Ro de Janeiro: Livres Técnicas « Cofcas, 1977), p. 8. Val oo ded ol was used by household slaves as a condiment to season food. See ToussntSamsoo, A Pei, p. Karas, Slave Lf p. 254 to, p. 256, thd, Table 2.3, p27; Russell Wood Te Black Ma, pp 38,135 and Ch, 8 for deals of Unotheroeds Professor andl Mrs Louis de Agassi, Journey in Braz (Boston: Ticknor and Fils, 1868), p30 Mavimilian 1, ‘Recollections of my ie (1868), in Conrad, Chitrn, pp. 195-7. Aledo Manga, Estudos sobre liraaras das nae finns de lige prea (Lisbon: ‘\ Reqra do Jogo, 1980), p. 394 Karasch, Sve Lie, p59, for spits ofthe water. thd. p- 26 Sc john T. Schneider, Dicionay of Ain Borrowings in Bazan Poenuere (Hamu einnt Buske Verlag, 1991). Kaach, Slav fe, hs 1 8 and 9; Edvatdo Siva, The Prine of the Pople (London: Verso, 1192); Calor Eugenio ibano Soares, merge: capes no Rio de fn {io de Janeiro; Prfetara da Cidade do Ro de Janet, Secretria Municipal de Cultura, nentagto formagie, Divisio de Edioraglo, 1994), Janeiro, 1808 1840 (Pin University Departamento. Geral da D Inaduction, David Brookshav, Hoja e Crna Literatura Brain (Porto Alegre: Mercato Aberto, 1983) p26, Ll da CAmara Casctao, Made in Afri pen Kagaach, Slave kif, th 103, p. 248, ¢notas (Rio de Janelto; 1965), cited in51 Lule Carton Martins Pena, Obras Raa eerie ma eau Chea mee eee ees : Brooks, Rage Cp 27 Se Martins Pena's ay eo Oi de mn and dr maint ings Jone de Aloe ton diode [ent Carne, 167) pried ation, Ri de Jane: Edlouro,Coeeo Presi ma), Ch 0 fic, pT On hirarchiel complementary, a Roberto da Matis, Aue e« rx (Ro de Jani Bes Gumbo leptin cron ep spell p52 also de Mata, Cas mana fer (ode ar: ata ers ers hi de ane Zar, 1978), hn Sater, Land an if Station from he Wings of Cal Orin Som, td by John Leigty (Berkely: Ualvesty of Calera rv 363). 333, os ids pp 933 and 342. By dhe 1870s, the “rt phase” was showing igs of economic ever but the ‘scond Ps’ of the cons evving coffe economy was Aourshing inthe Eastern Paraon Vale, snd was expanding ine northern and western ron of Ho Pale ann the “end mute (orest roe) of Minas Gea By the od of te century, nae Ges and tpt Sac were developing new tess ole rotons vas So Paulo hich hatte and anal ome free n enone ete Robert W. Sens “Grndezou decadent? O mercado de escravor ex economia cfecia torn ide 50-18 st Neocon a Bt he tenon dors (50 Pao: nntuts de Peruine Ecos, rein ne ies Exon, 1986) 1p. 105 Algo thee sais canbe foond in Nany Priscila Nao Rio studies Ro: cngcing ‘tes of Rio de ania, Bra The Amery vo 83, 0-4 (Apa 1987) 1p. 42940, Sir ‘randea ou cach, Gop 10,7 p18 ran Whatmore, arn Wane: God, Work and iy rir (London: Macrla, sa oe Fen Err (Loon: Macrilan, For Bahia se Pete Vrgr, Feet fin Paris Marin, 1968) Stare 9, Schra, S Pats inthe oration of Deion Say Ba 1530-1825 (Cambridge: Cambie Univerty Press, 1988); Kaa Quer Maso Sr rel (ao Pal: rains Skt; Bee Baik, Behn Cuerpo Sup, Tous, Case an Seventh Recomiy, 1780-1860 (Stanford Stanford Unveray Press, 1998), For Permambic, se Poser L. Eanberg Tr Sai Indy of Paani, 1840-1010; Moarartn het Chg Bercley University Caoria Pes 1970). Jame i, rom barge ea Socal specs of growth and mesenzation inthe roar inutry of Formac, Ba 1850-1900" pp. 965-9 edo jen Res, Recaro ro isd en ais 235 (So Paulo: aint, 1986) pp. 309-97 Tinitaty sed apes aes om the mame of Ro Bonito othe Cort Rela n Rio Ge ant n 1988 rea te types flac dios tat ane oth artis a ae ual cena leader te ear ra ott Gas Nar ites do cmpottatcte ici tccinnos de donnar socio to ral teas, 1850-1890 xtc Afri 13 (1988), pp Gio PS Cardoso, Agiaiars, tare patio (Petropolis: Vor 1979) scar ox corp Oprteinprato reg nax Amis Si Pa Basen, 1887) Elana Siva Sd Joao Jon Ree Nes eof atc ma Bl esate (0 Pal Companhia das Ltn 989), Ch : 73 Ordering the Wilderness Your years after the 1763 transfer of Brazil's colonial capital from Salvador, Bahia, in the sugar-producing northeast to the central southern port of Rio de Janeiro on Guanabara Bay, the governor-general of the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro was pesented with a topographical map of the area. Identified were major inland rivers, their tributaries, canals and mountain ranges, providing colonial author~ ivios with a guide to the hinterland landscapes that lay beyond the colonial ‘apital. The map traced the well-travelled Caminho Novo road that led north {rom the port capital of Rio de Janeiro to the mining towns and regional markets of the neighbouring captaincy of Minas Gerais. Vast stretches of hinterland highland terrain to the west of the road remained in Crown hands to discourage fontraband of gold and precious stones. As the mining economy waned after 1760, the potential of this area for mineral extraction and plantation agriculture led to royal land grants or sesmarias with the aim of effectively transforming the sparsely settled wilderness ateas of the public domain.’ In 1782, in recognition of the trade routes he had opened from the mountainous hinterlands of the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro to the lowlands and the port city of Rio, Francisco Rodrigues Alves was awarded a vast forested land grant inthe highland areas that covered almost one-third of the present-day Paraiba Valley. A second grant, called Rio Bonito (no relation to the lowland area of the same name), was awarded in the same year to Luis Homem de Azevedo. Settlers, squatters, traders and their slaves rushed into the area. In less eneration, bustling hamlets spread along the river valleys between the ‘Mantiqueira and the Serra do Mar mountain ranges. Traversed by the broad and gable Paraiba River and its tributaries, the Paraiba Valley formed a rolling, ranged from 15 to 80 metres than a ra da interconnected chain of dome-shaped hills th high, spreading from southwest to northeast between the captaincies of Sho Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, Fertile soi, plentiful water and coffee, the nineteenth-century equivalent of gold and diamonds, catapulted the southeast to economic prominence and provided the economic mainstay of nineteenth- ‘centuty post-independence Brazil. The Parafba Valley would become the ‘valley of slavery and huge coffee fazendas’,’ At the hub of the grandeur associated with tisip"tren wan Vassouras,‘Acommon juncture for trade between the highlandy.and the port city of Riode Janeiro were the Guanabara Bay ports th expansive Bay of Guanabara, The river Century and thrived from local dynamic private anc! Church-owned sugarcane plantations that co-existed with small semi-subsistence food-producing hold- tines supplying Rio de Janeiro and the Atlantic coast economy. One such port was on the Iguacu River where propertied elites, clergy and wealthy Portuguese ilministered a population, half of which was enslaved. Sugarcane was the ‘dominant export staple, followed by a bustling ttade in wood and foodstuffs ‘licial recognition of the prosperous colonial merchants and small-scale traders \who plied their trade through the river networks and Bay ports contrasted with the condemnation and repression of parallel contraband and illegal networks, ‘operated by fugitive slaves, ex-slaves and traders, which sold and exchanged foodstufs, yame, wood and pilfered goods to local outlets. Since colonial times, irmed! encampments of slaves had sprung up throughout the Americas in forests “ind in remote and usually hilly places that served as refuges for fugitives. The Irazilian variant of such hideaways, known as quilombos, were ‘fortified clusters of huts for defence against apprehension’, and included any grouping of six or more slaves.’ Distinguished from ranchos, temporary shelters for travellers and pack animals, the guilombos were located in inhospitable forested, mountainous and Swampy terrain. ‘The Bantu term ki-fombo was the name of a male initiation society or circumcision camp where young men were prepared for adult warrior Status. The term was linked to the Imbangala or ‘Jage’ warriors who swept into {what is present-day Angola in the sixteenth century. The Imbangala lived in a permanent state of warfare and, although they were reported to kill the babies born to their women, they adopted and integrated other children into their ranks, forming a multi-ethnic force united by a military structure.‘ The substitution of kinship by warfare as a unifying feature for some slaves thus preceded their arrival on American shores, but it also provided a unifying mechanism for ‘Africans whose kinship ties were destroyed under slavery.’ Stuart Schwartz has highlighted several features of Imbangala organization that provide a basis for the structure of Brazil's most studied and enduring quilomo, a seventeenth-century hideaway called Palmares. Palmares attracted thousands of runaway slaves and their free supporters, who occupied a palm-shaded remote area in the interior of the present state of Alagoas in northeastern Brazil. Although most inhabitants were runaway African slaves, the quilombos also harboured freecmen, deserters and middlemen linked to informants, tavern owners and traders.* Palmares was razed in 1695, a year after its acclaimed leader and chief, Zumbi, perished! Yet slavery continued to inform the Brazilian plantation complex. The population of slaves in 1798 was 1,582,000, approximating but not surpassing the free population of 1,666,000. By 1817, however, the reverse was true: the slave population exceeded the free population, 1,930,000 to 1,887,900." Armed ‘encampments of runaways also continued to be a feature of colonial society. A lay to the east of the capital on the ul bay potts dated from the sevente police count taken in 1826 reported 426 quilombolas (Tugitive slaves who sought refuge in a quilombo) in the hilly topography of the port city and eapital of Rio de Janeiro." An additional 469 were scattered throughout the hinterland of the province, Most of there were centred in the Bay port areas of long-standing en but a few dotted the Atlantic coast between Cabo Frio and Parat aud landowners who, ttle Tretehed into the highlands." Colonial officials and pris aac threatened either personally or economically by the fugitive hideaways Freanded and raided the retreats, but the raids by the fugitives on rrowtinued, The booty from these raids was traced clandestinely with tavern Hepersy roving traders and slave go-betweens, who protected the hideaways 95 san they profited from the informal commercial networks." Quilombos iso virtjeted with landowners, merchants and religious estates co suppl) apie, Tatts and wood to regional markets and ro the city of Rio de Janeiro. The jhetaposition ofthe informal slave economies withthe formal economy charac. nntapesthe interdependent, complementary, yet often competing, set of w tonships that accompanied the de jure and de facto occupation of land, roads a rerways and the interplay among slaves and free people who defined ‘ociely in the hinterlands during the nineteenth century. ‘Whereas the Guanabara Bay port of Iguacu handled and trans-shipped prod ucts from the sparsely populated highland and lowland agricultural peripheries ‘lt fed into the colonial capital, the Bay port of Porto das Calxas served an area ae jc east that stretched through lowland forested areas, interconnected rivers, 1° utaries and canals to the coastal sugat-producing region of Campos. Hinter~ et hamlets, named after the Catholic saints who were honoured in their rustic ainpets, dotted the river, attesting tothe advantages of water overland travel or ‘ccloration, commerce and internal communication at this time To the northeast of Porto das Caixas, the Casseriba River wound along che nace ofthe Taguara and Sambé mountain ranges to the Rio Bonito River and Pees hove to the d'Ouro River. In 1682, a Crown land grant to Pedro de Souza Ftiga covered the ‘land between the Casseribs and Tangua Rivers In 1760, five vars after the arrival ofthe first settlers, che chapel of Madre de Deus, ar the site vais the two rivers converged, marked the settlement that would give birth ro the parish of Rio Bonito in 1768, named a vila (cown) less than a century later fn Ii and a city in 1890." Set against a backdrop of the Serra do Mar mountait vanes the teretory was ancharted and the Limitations facing exploration 29 nee tint were summed up by the following description: ‘backlands occupied by wild Indians’. aes sines and chapels ded dhe ver hat wea te snares of low-lying hilly ranges to the south of Porto das Caixas, gateways to the se oot Conn land grantees. A Crown land grant issued in 1751 to Paulo da Mota Duque Estrada destined the rolling hillsides ofthe Sambé ancl Catima for arvtlement, By 1767, there was a handful of privately owned sugarcane estates Tngenho Pacheco, Engenho Monte Velho and Engenho do Lagarto that pre ee tane and produced a whisky known as para or eachaja. The mills attested «sth limited, albeit prevalent, extension of unequal social relations th 10 tied masters and slaves in colonial production for the plantation complex (see Figure 1) lee areasan i Figure 1 Settlement map of the province of Rio de J F rin Jancito, 1868, Source: Candido Mendes de Almeida, Atlas do Império do Brazil, 1868. Redrawn by Keith Scurr, Geography Department, University of Hull ‘Two towns In the cool hilly areas bse coo above the valleys where sugarcane had provided Brazil with 4 colonial mainstay, slat! mainstay, dhe introduction of eofeepreducton caused widespread iforesiation inthe wake ofthe intensive culation ofan, andled tthe Use of inary labour by the powerful who made legal claims to the plantation scutes te small cale producers of Brazi's dietary mrinstays of manioe ities eho firmed the land and th eee an slaes whose Rio onito, which lies in the lowland Restinga micro-region'* across bara ty, 60 miles othe est ofthe Bayport of Net, and Vestn wanna, situated 137 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro in the highlands of the Westen urarba Valley, were each approximately a day's journey from Rio. Neither Imus existed in the late eighteenth century, although sparsely populated Parishes of traders, food producers and an occasional sugar estate decd heal seas! The Braziian geographer, Albetto Ribeito Laméye, describes! ¥. 4 4 ‘miracle of a geographical error, a city that emerged outside of the eg vergence of trade routes, developed without oil support geographical reasons to warrant its dey ‘teas of neighbo srantees and the Brazilian high /assoura il presented no velopment,” From the derelict minin; sand from the court city of Rio de Janeiro, land ir slaves, prompted by the potential profits to be made. from 1 coffee in international markets, migrated into the highlands, Fable 2.1 Brazilian sugar and colfee exports, 1821 40. Sugar Yous Annual Average Percentage Anni Percentage weight in value in of total weight in value in of total tons pounds export tons. pounds export we value w value W215 4, 983,600 23.2 12,480 739,600 17.6 1526-3054, 1,369,600 37.8 25,680 698,200 19.7 Is31-5 66,716 1,091,500 23.5 46,980 2,001,500 40.7 136-40 79.010 1,320,800 24.3 69,900 2,428,000 46.0 Nominal value unadjusted for inflation ‘owce: Adapted from Peter L. Eisenberg, Moderizardo sem mudanga (Sao Paulo: UNICAMP/Paz e Terra, 1977), Table 2, p. 34 They subsequently displaced the Coroado Indians, cleared forests and planted «oflee, drawing on the Paraiba River and its tributaries for irigation, shipment und trade.” Private appropriation of land and the demand for captive labour to farm it formed an integral part of that migration and the societies that emerged from it. As Rio de Janeiro was transformed from a colonial outpost to a cosmopolitan weat of government after the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, the construction of the Commercio, Rodeio and Policia roads extended communica- ‘ions between the capital and the hinterland in support of the coffee economy. By 140, paths and overland routes connected lowland areas to river and Guanabara hay ports, forging links to the highland villages, towns and districts of the Paraiba Valley. Established planters whose extensive holdings of land derived from svsmaria grants turned from sugarcane to coffee production as newcomers swept Into the area. The export market for sugarcane remained dynamic in the north- cast but in southeast Brazil the reliance on sugar production for the international ‘et was eclipsed by the international demand for coffee. Whereas sugar ‘exports represented 23 per cent of total exports compared to coffee's 17 per cent between 1821 and 1825, international demand reversed those figures, and coffee ‘exports reached 40 per cent of the total value of exports in the early 1830s in contrast almost unchanging figures for sugar (23 per cent) (Table 2.1) ‘The five prominent sugarcane and aguardente (sugarcane spitit) producers, Antonio Félix de Oliveira Braga, Camillo José Pereira de Faro, the heits of José Clemente Pereira, Lauriano Corréa ¢ Castro and José Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar ‘were among the esteemed coffee-producing oligarchies as the Paraiba Valley, with Vassouras at its hub, became the world's largest area of coffee production between 1850 and 1900." Fortunes made from the coffee-export market pro= Vided comfortable lifestyles for these and numerous newcomers, who became known as the ‘coffee barons’, « plantocracy of merchant-planter elites whose reputations for wealth, vast holdings of slaves ancl land preceded them in the corflddts of power in the imperial court of Rio de Janeiro. For most of thetly century, their wealth lay in and anwl in the Atv slayes who laboured under the arduous plantation ¢ ternational d Ml De ne that was galvanized to incl. For te latter, fortune was equated with survival andl ‘eventual freedom. Rio Bonito, on the other hand, was an outlying parish inthe county of Kabora 1 major colonial producer of sugarcane that lay inland from the provincial capital Of Niteréi. From inauspicious beginnings, Rio Bonito developed into a regional snarker town where sugarcane and the cross-cropping of coffee with foodstuffs supported a local elite of planters and traders with powerful regional links and Lentious ties tothe export markets of the imperial court. As will be seen, although the coffee economy was important t0 Rio Bonito, the smaller scale of land holdings, the diversity of production and the alternatives to slave labour made collee cultivation les vital to the wellbeing of the municipio than was the case for Vassouras Distant origins of a bitter bean Coffee was not native to Brazil. The most common of the diverse origins attributed to the mubiacea bean are the mountain forests of Ethiopia. A folkloric taleattributes the first use of coffee to the superior of a convent of fiars on Mount Sinai, who offered an infusion of coffee to sleepy choristers after observing the excessive vivaciousness of goats that had consumed the plants. Another version singles out the Turks for the spread of coffee consumption throughout Islam.” A hot black beverage was known by the Egyptians as elcave, by the Persians as cahweh, by the Arabians as cachua, caowz and cahouah, and from these words originated the terms commonly known in Eutope: caphé, café, cof, cofee and cofjea.® A. 1591 description ofa pleasant ink-coloured drink calle haube that was 00d for illness, chiefly ofthe stomach, was given by Prosper Alpinus, a physician to the Venetian consul, who remained in Egypt from 1580 to 1593. Known in England by 1650, and the object of considerable attention in the first coffee- house that opened in 1652, the medicinal properties and benefits of coffee lay at the heart of controversies over stomach and nervous disorders. These were associated as much with excessive consumption of the brew as with the ques- tionable morals of the fashionable European urban coffee-houses that became the forums of thinkers, plotters and connoisseurs.” The addictive properties of the bieter-tasting mixture prompted Johann Sebastian Bach to compose the “amusing seventeenth-century ‘Coffee Cantata’ about the fraught and afflicted maiden, Liesgen, whose intransigent father threatened to abanclon his search for, a suitor if she did not desist from her consumption of coffee."* Controversies raged over the etymology of the bitter black beverage that some associated with nausea, others with appetice stimulus, and still others with vigour and stamina. “Among coffee’s virtues were its invigorating qualities, stimulating effect on the ulation, acceleration of digestion, treatment of colic and curbing of flaw lence.’’ 1 was said to stimulate the onset of menses, was used with some success in cures of dropsy, and was effective in the treatment of parasites, headache, vertigo, lethargy, catarth, ticklish coughs and apoplexy. Coffee was an antidote 1o the hypnotic or sleepy effects of opium, and thowe ‘connatose, anasarcous, and Much other discases axgarise from unwholeyome foot, want of exercise, weak {ibres, and obstructed perspiration’. ‘The coffee seeds that were introduced into the New World by European colonial powers were derived from two Yemeni varieties, rpica and bourbon. The Dutch transported coffee plantings to the Caribbean in the early 1700s, and by 1718 coffee bushes were reported in Dutch Surinam, Gabriel des Clieux took plants to the French Caribbean in 1728, although there were reports of coffee in 1721 in French Cayenne and in 1727 in Martinique, English Jamaica was producing coffee in 1728, and in Spanish America coffee was growing in Puerto Rico in 1736, in Cuba in 1738 and in Guatemala between 1750 and 1760.” A popular Brazilian brand of coffee called Palheta traces its name to Francisco de Melo Palheta, a Brazilian army officer who is credited with bringing coffee seeds from French Cayenne to Belém, Pard, around 1727. The cultivation of the seeds sgencrated little interest in Brazil until the promulgation of a decree on 4 May 1761 that exempted the product from custom-house duties.” During the gover- hnatships of the Conde de Bobadella and the Marquis of Lavradio, small-scale ‘oflee production intensified and by 1790 approximately one ton of coffee was Circulating in local markets.” The popularity of coffee in the urban centres of Trurope was not shared by Portuguese consumers, who preferred tea and hot chocolate, but the growing demand for it may have prompted the enlightened Vortuguese friar, José Mariano da Conceigao Velloso, to include coffee imong the staples he recommended for intensive cultivation in his multi-volume ( fazendero no Brasil, published in 1798 in Lisbon.”* The exact date of coffee’s first appearance in the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro is ‘unknown, although itis likely that the Society of Jesus, known in the Portuguese ‘empire for crop experimentation, was involved in its early cultivation. An article in the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1917 attributed the propagation of coffee in Rio to the Capuchinsand the Bishop of Rio, Catholic institutions were among the principal suppliers of coffee seeds. Bushes were reported in the gardens of the Santo Antonio Convent in 1754 and among the plantings ofthe Barbadinho friars tn the Rua Evaristo da Veiga around 1760, the Santa Teresa Convent, the Capito {lo Bispo estate and in the gardens of Padre Antonio de Couto da Fonseca in Campo Grande around 1780." The latter's crop experimentation post in Campo Grande was said to supply mule trains with shipments of seed for the ascent inds.""The artist, Jean Baptiste Debret, dated coffee planting from the 1770s." TThe transition of coffee production from domestic household use to extensive cultivation probably coincided with the intensification of international demand for Brazilian ‘green gol! cofea arabica linneus (pentandria monogynia) that followed the revolution in Saint Domingue. According to Gilberto Ferrez, a prominent hineteenth-century photographer, the units of under 20,000 trees that dotted the hillsides of Rio de Janeito, the Tijuca rainforest and the parishes of Andaral and Jacarepagud were not sufficient to satisfy North nd Western European buyers, Ferrez claimed that intensive production of upwards of 60,000 trees only took place after 1816 when the Haitian refugee, Louls Francois Lecesne, arrived in Rio de Janeiro.” Claimants to land migrated with slaves from the port city westTable 2.2 Production, export 1840-60 nd price of collee, province of Rio de Janeiro, Year Exported from Production in Price per arroba port of Rio province of Rio AES PHP A (TSE AG LATOR) BE EPP 18402 4,982,221 = 38519 1345-6 7,720,221 B 35028 1849-50 5,706,833 z 38866 1851-2 9,673,842 7,535,844 38396 1852-3 8:312,561 6,535,113, 38764 1853-4 10,128,908 7,988,551 38896 18545 12,024,063 9)369,107 38890 1855-6 10,918,148 8,602,658 48301 1856-7 10,426,449 8,097,879 48627 1857-8 9,415,843 7,593,200 45167 1858-9 10,286,504 8,082,953 58199 1859-60 10,606,394 8,746,361 58829 ‘Source: Adapted from Stein, Vassouras, Table 4, p. 53. Until 1942, Brazilian currency ‘was based on réis, mil-réis and contos. 1000 éis = 1 mil-réis; 1000 réis = I conto. For example, 1:3008519 reads 1 conto 300 mil-réis, 519 réis. to Itaguai and from there into the forested highlands of the Paraiba Valley, where they formed the nucleus of intensive coffee cultivation.** On the opposite side of the bay from Rio de Janeiro, coffee production expanded from Sio Gongalo, through lowland areas like Rio Bonito, into the foothills of Magé, and from there, more gradually than in the western areas, to the highlands of the Eastern Paraiba Valley. Cross-cropped with corn and beans, and vying with manioc and sugar as a mainstay of the Brazilian diet, coffee’s rapid advance took place within four decades from the outset of production, redesigning Rio de Janeito's physical landscape and curning slave labour into a feature of the hinterland labour landscape. The reign of coffee Coffee production intensified with international demand. During the 1840s, for example, coffee exports, valued at £22,655, accounted for 47 per cent of total Brazilian exports. During the following decade, the value of coffee exports more than doubled to £49,741, as the figure increased to 54 per cent of total exports.” Rising coffee prices, which had fluctuated between 3$300 and 3$900 per arrah (15 kilograms) in the first half of the 1850s, increased to 4$627 in 1856-7 and, despite poorer harvests in 1857-8, prices reached a high of §$829 in 1859-60" (Table 2.2) Coffee prices fell abruptly in the world purchasing centres in 1857 and 1858, declining from 11 t0 10.4 cents per pound in New York, and generated a run on the banks in the capital ay coffee factors attempted to cover their clients’ orders ported yoods.*! The recovery of international markets atthe nsive coffee production that high in. 1863, Jin for foodstutts cond of the decade set in motion the eycle of int iesponded to steadily inereasing prices per sack, reaching, Uleclining during the rest of the decade and rey ‘generally upward tre the 1870s."" Food shortages continued to plague the highlands and, in 1861 provincial officials protested the outlandish prices of foodstuffs, coffee planters ‘lecried their dependency on external suppliers." That year marked the death of avon Lacerda Werneck, a planter-merchant whose fortune had not endowed vint with the sagacity to foresee that the uncontrolled ravaging, of the region's resources would create irreversible imbalances. Swiss consul, Johann ied his travel observations in 1862, perceived the mported Jukob von Tschudi, who publi inony of a situation where the mainstays of com, rice and beans we Irom the United States and from Europe, paid for by the increased state and overriment income derived from coffee."* Vassouras planters who were caught inthe paradox took their market cues from foreign markets. Whether they were wate of it or not, the international returns from the sale of coffee were luncerwtiting the costs of importing food, including salted beef from Argentina (o feed the slave and free labour forces that were producing it in the first place The French traveller, Charles de Ribeyrolles, exhorted Brazilians to preserve the sources of their nutrition and not be bound by the immediate gains offered by ee: Brazilians, do not disparage the pig, or anil or th the bee or the banana. Plants, fruits, animals may be secondary but they are nourishing; one only drinks coffee at clessert ... But coflee sells so handsomely!" ‘The regional drift of the Rio de Janeiro provincial population, ¢. 1840 The 1840 census of the province of Rio de Janeiro provides a detailed register of the composition and distribution of the fluminense population during cofl heyday and acts as a point of departure for comparisons with later census data The census attests tothe virtual extinction of the Indian nations that figuted so prominently in the 1767 map, eclipsed from the human topography through enment, warfare ancl miscegenation. The category of ‘Indians’ no sn replaced by the term caboclos. Caboclos were dis tinguished from bugres (uncivilized people and a generic term for Indians), equated by some historians with a mixec-breed peasantry." The low numbers are typical of inission figures although the term aldiados (village dwellers) does not appear in census.” Caboclos accounted for little more than I per cent of the total provincial population, in a census total of 407,241 that I have revised to 404,705, The largest concentrations were clustered in tiny settlements on the peripheries of the frontier in Barea Mansa, agua, Campos andl Cabo Frio (Table 2:3) En route to one of the last Pui Indian eneampments in the Eastern Paratba Valley on the borders of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais In the 1840s, the longer existed, and had bTable 2.3 Cabuelo population of Rio de Janetro province, by county, 1840 County Males Females County total % provincial population Rezende 851 859 i710 oan ‘Vassouras 399 357 7 a8. Cantagalo v7 16 33 0.008 Niteréi 108 110 218. 0.05 aboral 57 38 95 0.02 Campos a4 349) 663 16. Cabo Frio 531 563 1094 027 Angra dos Réis 528 517 1045 025 Grand roral 2798 2817 5615 138 No census data was forthcoming from Nossa Senhora da Conceisio do Paquequer in the district of Cantagalo;Jacotiaga, Pilar, Inhomerim in the district of Niter6i; Tamby, Santissima Trindade in the district of Iraboral; Desterro de Quissama, Curato do Carapebiis, Curato do Barreto in the district of Cabo Frio. See Appendix One for breakdown by municipio, Source: BN, Quadro Estatistico da Provincia de Rio de Janeiro, segundo condiges, sexo e cdres, 1840, Austrian traveller, Ida Pfeiffer, happened upon a sertlement of cabecles at a place that she described as the ‘last settlement of the whites" (see Figure 2) Twelve miles inland from the Pomba River stood a largish wooden house surrounded by a few miserable huts ‘as that of the slaves’, Each of four rooms was occupied by a white family and was furnished with a few hammocks and straw mats. The detached kitchen resembled a very large bam with openings in it; uupon @ hearth that cook up nearly che entire length of the barn, several fires were burning, over which hung small kettles, and at cach side were fastened wooden spits. On these were fixed several pieces of meat, some of which were being roasted by the fire and some cuted by the smoke. The kitchen was fall of people; whites, Puri Indians, and negroes, children whose parents were whites and Puris, or Puris and negroes ~ in a word, the place was like a book of specimens containing the most vatied ramifications of the three principal races of the country."* Ida Pfeiffer's description attested to the coming together of the poor and dis cd on the peripheries of settled areas. The inligenous lifestyle of the Puri Indians was assimilating with other races and ethnicities and adopting a semi- sedentary way of life as caboclos. The fruits of the forest and basic and me hand-fashioned domestic possessions provided a means for some indigenous sto survive; but most aspects of tribal and linguistic identity were replaced by Portuguese language and ethnic Intermixtute, Figure 2 Indigenous encampment. Source: Jean Baptist Debret, Viagem Pitoresca« Historica do Brasil, 1834, Photo taken between 1816 and 1831. OF eater numerical significance waste ree population, hovering inthe 40 pereett range in most counties and subdivided beven white, prdo (mulatto) in pete (Back) men aed women. The white population was the largest ad white males slighty outnumbered hive females, Pardr outnumbered (re Macks by more than thre to one; pard feral slightly outnumbered pare hates At is time the Ronit fee population of approximately 64,00 pple was sizeable and probably inched mor (mise-ice) and assed Init; bac was belo the numbers of masters and as wl bescen, slaves (Table 2) (See Appendix 2 fra breakdown by county) Inthe county of Vassouas, where the produetion of coe forthe expor sonic, Tn same was tue in Resende and Canagalo but notin fowl areas Mire, among whites, males outnumbered females In Niter, Cabo Fro and Ange den Res Ameng the nonite population inthe wands fee women Teale head fay unis of production eng Cronseropped cofee and fost in areas that were Tormey d Slaves represented the third and largest category of the 1840. provinelal census, accounting for 5 per cent of the provincial population, Slaves: w divided into two subcategories: pardo and preto. Slaves listed as preto accounted for 94 per cent (210, 320 of the total slave population of 223,568), and of these 62 per cent were males, With the exception of Vassouras, slave and free numbers were about equal in each county, Slaves were Involved In unskilled and skilled tudks that ranged from domestic service and weaving to animal care, field andTable 2.4 Free population of Rio de Janeiro province, by county, 1840 White Pardo Black County Male Female Male Female Male Female Total Resende 6956 6361 2363-2145 460 «396—«18,679 Vassouras 8226 6620 3963 3469930847 24,055 Cantagalo 2030-1755 «7336691703390 Nitersi 6871 6124 3523. 428713931854 24,052 Itaborai 8626 87214758 ©5396 «979-1209 «29,680 Campos 9272 9398 3263 3732946 1147—27,748 Cabo Frio 6362 6110 30493516 504655 20,196 Angrados Réis 9137 8361-3027 3293813. «978 —25,609 Sum total 57,482 53450 24,669 26,507 6195 7219 175,522" Sum total by category 110,932, 51,176 13,414 Percentage of total 63.20 29.16 7.64 * Uhave revised the additions in the census and have a total of 175,522. No census data was forthcoming from Nossa Senhora Conceig@o do Paquequer in the district of Cantagalo; Jacotiaga, Pilar, Inhomerim in the district of Niterdi; Tamby, Santissima Trindade in the district of Itaboral; Desterro de Quissamé, Curato do (Carapebiis, Curato do Barreto in the district of Cabo Frio. Source: BN, Quadro Estatistico da Provincia de Rio de Janeiro, Segundo condizbes, Sexo e cres, 1840. garden farming, itinerant trading, construction, road and fence building, labour in manufactories, foundries, artisan workshops, transportation and personal services; in short, almost every kind of manual labour. Slave numbers were high in areas of long-standing settlement ~ the lowland port and provincial capital of Niter6i overlooking Guanabara Bay, the Atlantic fishing village of Cabo Frio and the sugarcane-producing lowland areas of ‘Campos, Itaboral and Angra dos Réis - but these were giving way to the labour demands of the emerging nuclei of coffee production in the highland counties ‘exemplified by Vassouras.” Whereas the ratio of males to females was 165:100 in the province, not very different from the figure of 156:100 in traditional areas of colonial sugar-production like Campos, the sex ratio in the highland coffee areas Was well over 200:100, confirming the existence of a dynamic plantation society where predominantly Aftican male slaves were in the highest demand (Table 25). The distribution of male and female slaves sheds light on local land allocation and usage, By 1840, the intensive production of sugarcane for the export market that had concentrated slave labour on lowland estates during colonial times was ‘now engaged in production for regional sugarcane markets. AC the time of his travels in the 1820s, the English traveller, James Henderson, heralded ‘the Campos sugars [as] the best in Brazil” but added that they ‘were only consumed Table 2.5. Slave popuilation of Rio de Janeiro province, by county and by colour, 140 z As percentage As fof county percentage populitlon of province Number (eand oo a a Soya See! ne lee a ated howme 73109 s2—~«YO~*~*~OSC THN Vue soon es 21a «5603026 14824218 Comegle 2 vet 3806 1709208 wer aot oat 808 TTS aT sa habit 3r0ee si TBR TSS 1615112590 128 Cima 37318551788 eh 20986 13.396 186 Camino 22506 53 «102011758 ASL BANG 183 fads mone 52 1318 NOSR— 15215-10598 148 vn! —-223588 100,100, BSRD 295131087 78283168 nly are smn 21030 Source: BN, Quadro Estatistico da Provincia de Rio de Jancir, Segundo condigbes, Sexo e Ores, 1840. Llomestically" With the downward spiral in sugar prices and the contraction of the foreign export market for sugarcane, a shift from large-scale intensive production of sugarcane to small-scale food production occurred in these areas, Henderson wryly noted on his journey to Parati, Ilha Grande and Angra dos Réis, in the early 1820s that sugar estates and distilleries were giving way to small farms where figs, wine, ce, beans and mie were grove, and some poultry raising took place.” He described the area as being in ‘as Inedioerity. Porsemi-subsstence producers, an expanding coastal trade that no only provisioned passing ships but also supplied foodstuffs to the expanding local markets in Rio de Janeiro provided a modest but viable alternative to plantation labour, The existence of quilombos in nearby Mangaratiba and Paratl, as well as a proliferation of taverns in the area, linked a coastal network of boatmen into an informal economy that operated in tandem, and sometimes surpassed, the registered and licensed channels of production and commerce in the Iguacu and ‘Bay port areas already mentioned." Slaves and slave ownership related to one's ‘Ownership of slaves was indicative of wealth and was directly relat soclorecoviomie standing in rai agrarian oct The large an younger he holdings of human property, the greater the public association with wealth,