Urban slavery

Published on Sept 15th, 2014 by The Jewish Daily Forward

Beyond the Wealth of Jewish South Carolina lies a Troubling History - a study of Mordecai and David Cohen of Charleston: Philanthropists and slave owners.  One of their slaves, Jim, escaped and survived to share his life experiences being tortured under their command.

During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. It also emerged from the actions of people who used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression, especially members of the city's immense enslaved population and the growing number of free persons of African descent. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This article explores how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. It was at night when both the necessity and fragility of what jurists in Brazil called the "freedom to come and go" came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that, although invisible at the national level, fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.

Todo comentário sobre os desenhos e as aquarelas de Debret pode parecer redundante na medida em que o pintor estudou ao longo dos anos e descreveu pormenorizadamente as cenas brasileiras por ele retratadas. Sucede, porém, que a vasta difusão, sobretudo no Brasil, das estampas da Viagem pitoresca e histórica acabou tornando secundário, e fez às vezes esquecer, o complemento textual da obra.

This paper follows the enslaved woman Teofila from captivity to freedom in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro. To become a free woman, Teofila had to navigate the complex private credit networks of the West African community of the Brazilian capital city. With limited banking activity, the Cariocas relied on one another for their financial needs, making for a highly convivial credit market that reflected and reinforced the vast inequalities of Brazilian slave society. While following Teofila through the courts of Rio de Janeiro, this paper will demonstrate that one of the cornerstones of the city’s credit market was the presence of an intertwined relationship between credit and private property. The commerce in human beings like Teofila produced thousands of negotiable titles, with slavery working as a propeller for credit circulation and one of its pillars – slave property was the primary collateral for unpaid debts.

Spanning a period of over 450 years, this book traces Rio's history, culture, and politics. It contains a mix of primary documents—many appearing in English for the first time—that present the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.

No século XVIII e nos primeiros decênios do século XIX, três mó- veis distintos determinam as iniciativas oficiais luso-brasileiras no âmbito da imigração livre. Em primeiro lugar, as autoridades procuram consolidar o povoamento de regiões militarmente vulneráveis, como o Sul do Brasil, onde famílias açorianas são introduzidas após o tratado de Madri (1750) e onde, no início do século XIX, colônias militares são estabelecidas. Da mesma forma, terras devolutas são por vezes distribuídas a colonos em re- giões ameaçadas por tribos indígenas ou por quilombos. Em segundo lu- gar, a introdução de trabalhadores livres responde às necessidades de mão- de-obra do setor terciário. Centro do vice-reino português desde 1763, se- de da corte portuguesa entre 1808 e 1821, capital do Império do Brasil a partir de 1822, o Rio de Janeiro é o palco de trabalhos contínuos de forti- ficação e de obras urbanas.

Atlantic port cities were sites of commercial, consumer, and industrious revolutions in the eighteenth century. This essay argues that accounts of the Atlantic consumer and industrious revolutions need to include African port cities because they were an important market for consumer goods and services. The Senegambian cities of Saint-Louis and Gorée were port cities involved in the consumption of Atlantic and global goods, as well as in the provision of services for ships involved in trade, and especially the slave trade. They had a class of women involved in the economic transformation of the cities, who help illustrate the role of consumerism, as well as the possibilities for accumulation created by the institution of domestic urban slavery. It is useful to look at African port cities because their experiences of urban slavery can help us think critically about what is meant by the industrious household and about how women in different Atlantic contexts were able to accumulate and use invested capital in varying ways.