The Destruction Of Brazilian Slavery 1850 1888

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This pro-slavery propaganda, though perhaps intended mainly for foreigners, influenced the thinking of may Brazilians, resulting in one memorable contradiction which is reproduced in this book.

This book examines the demographic and economic history of slavery in Minas Gerais, the single largest slave-holding region in Brazil, from its settlement in the early eighteenth century until the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888. This slave population was remarkable in its ability to diversify economically as well as to increase through natural reproduction, rather than through importation via the trans-Altantic slave trade. Extensively researched and finely documented, this book places the history of a unique Brazilian slave community into comparative perspective.

This book was published originally in French in 1979 and in Portuguese in 1982. Written without scholarly footnotes for a general readership, it is a deceptively simple book direct in its presentation, lacking a specialized jargon, and organized in an imaginative and interesting way. But it also is a volume that reflects some of the most recent and innovative research on the question of slavery. Putting aside the somewhat arid debate over the feudal or capitalist nature of the "slave mode of production" and the political aspects of the movement for abolition, To Be a Slave in Brazil presents an overview of Brazilian slavery which reflects the trend toward study of the slave community, religion, the family, and other features of the internal aspects of slavery. - Foreword.