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3 - Agrarian Empires, Plantation Communities, and Slave Families in a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Coffee Zone

from Part I - Law, Precarity, and Affective Economies during Brazil’s Slave Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Brodwyn Fischer
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Keila Grinberg
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Summary

This chapter discusses the existence and reproduction of enslaved families during Brazil’s second slavery through a case study of the Guaribú fazenda (plantation), located in the Vassouras region of Rio de Janeiro’s Paraíba Valley, which was at the time the world’s most productive coffee region. Guaribú’s history allows us to advance three arguments. First, we demonstrate the ways in which the concepts of “agrarian empires,” “plantation communities,” and “slave neighborhoods” can help us to understand both familial relationships and those that developed between slaves and masters. Second, we show that slave families living on large plantations had better chances than those who lived on smaller estates of remaining together across generations in stable family formations. And finally, we argue that this familial stability enabled Brazil’s “mature slavery,” during which positive birth rates ensured the preservation of enslaved labor even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850.

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Chapter
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The Boundaries of Freedom
Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil
, pp. 83 - 107
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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