Everything about Slavery In Brazil totally explained
During the
colonial epoch and for over six decades after the
1822 independence, slavery was a mainstay of the
Brazilian economy, especially in
mining and
sugar cane production.
Brazil obtained 35.4% of all
African slaves traded in the
Atlantic slave trade, more than 3 million slaves were sent to Brazil to work mainly on sugar cane
plantations from the 16th to the 19th century. Starting around
1550, the Portuguese began to trade African slaves due to two main reasons:
- The unenculturated indigenous peoples deteriorated rapidly, and became increasingly warier of the Portuguese, thus, obtaining new indigenous slaves was becoming harder and harder.
- The Portuguese Empire, at the time, controlled some stages within the African slave trade's commercial chain, thus, providing the Brazilian landholders with the availability to import slaves from Portuguese trading posts in Africa. Portuguese, Brazilian, and African slave traders managed to profit even more from the increased demand.
During the 15th century, after realising the extension and importance of slave trade for the African economy, the
Kingdom of Portugal's soldiers, explorers and merchants
involved themselves in the trade in black African slaves along with other tradable items through the establishment of several coastal trading posts. Starting around 1550, the Portuguese began to trade African slaves to work the sugar plantations they were developing in their newly-discovered colony of Brazil, once the European discoverers needed more human resources to use in the new continent, and the numbers of native
indigenous peoples had declined. Although Portuguese Prime Minister
Marquês de Pombal abolished slavery in mainland Portugal on the February 12th, 1761, slavery continued in Portugal's overseas colonies, particularly in Brazil.
The African slaves were useful for the sugar plantations in many ways. They were less vulnerable to
tropical diseases. Slavery was practice among all classes. From late 18th century to the 1830s, including by the time of the
Rebellions in Bahia, slaves were owned by upper and middle classes, by the poor, and even by other slaves.
The benefits of using the slaves far exceeded the costs to the owners. After 2-3 years, slaves repaid the cost of buying them, and slave plantation owners began to make profits from them. Brazil's plantation owners made lucrative profits per year. The very harsh manual labour of the sugar cane fields involved slaves using hoes to dig large trenches. They planted sugar cane in the trenches and then used their bare hands to spread manure.
Bandeira
From
Sao Paulo the
Bandeirantes, adventurers mostly of mixed
Portuguese and
Indian ancestry, penetrated steadily westward in their search for Indian slaves. Along the
Amazon river and its major tributaries, repeated slaving raids and punitive attacks left their mark. One French traveller in the 1740s described
hundreds of miles of river banks with no sign of human life and once-thriving villages that were devastated and empty. In some areas of the
Amazon Basin, and particularly among the
Guarani of southern
Brazil and
Paraguay, the
Jesuits had organized their
Jesuit Reductions along military lines to fight the slavers. In 1628, Antônio Raposo Tavares led a bandeira, composed of 2,000 allied Indians, 900 Mamluks (Mestizos) and 69 white Paulistanos, to find precious metals and stones or to capture Indians for
slavery or both. This expedition alone was responsible for the destruction of most of the Jesuit missions of Spanish Guairá and the enslavement of over 60,000 indigenous people.
Quilombo
Escaped slaves formed
Maroon communities which played an important role in the histories of other countries such as
Suriname,
Puerto Rico,
Cuba, and
Jamaica. In Brazil the
Maroon villages were called
quilombos and the most famous was
Quilombo dos Palmares. In the mid to late
19th century, many
Amerindians were enslaved to work on
rubber plantations.
Jean-Baptiste Debret
Jean-Baptiste Debret, a French painter who was active in Brazil in the first decades of the 19th Century, started out with painting portraits of members of the Brazilian Imperial family, but soon became concerned with the slavery of both blacks and the indigenous inhabitants. During the fifteen years Debret spent in Brazil, he not only concentrated on court rituals but the everyday life of slaves as well. His paintings on the subject (two appear on this page) helped draw attention to the subject in both Europe and Brazil itself.
Brasil, the world's largest sugar producer
The
Clapham Sect, although their religious and political influence was more active in the Spanish Latin America, were a group of
evangelical reformers that campaigned during much of the 19th century for the United Kingdom to use its influence and power to stop the traffic of slaves to Brazil. Besides moral qualms, the low cost of slave-produced Brazilian sugar meant that British colonies in the West Indies were unable to match the market prices of Brazilian sugar, and each Briton was consuming 16 pounds (7 kg) of sugar a year by the 19th century. This combination led to intensive pressure from the British government for Brazil to end this practice, which it did by steps over three decades. To this day, Brasil still is the world's largest sugar producer .
Steps towards freedom
José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva is credited as the "Father of Brazilian Independence". Around 1822,
Representação to the Constituent Assembly was published and addressed that not only the slave trade must end, but also for the gradual emancipation of slaves. However, since this point until the 1880s, the Brazilian demand for slaves was filled by a gigantic increase in the importation of African slaves.
In 1848, the
Brazilian slave trade continued on considerable level growing rapidly during the 19th century, and during this time the numbers reached as much as 60,000 slaves per year. Portugal and its territories in Africa had already stepped down from slave trade activities, but in other African coast's ports the slave trade continued. In Brazil, the foreign slave trade was finally abolished by
1850, and there were new laws on slave traffickers and speculators. Then, by
1871, the sons of the slaves were freed. In
1885, the slaves aged over 60 years were freed. The
Paraguayan War contributed to end slavery, since slaves enlisted in exchange for freedom.
Brazil's 1877-78
Grande Seca (Great Drought) in the cotton-growing northeast, led to major turmoil, starvation, poverty and internal migration. As wealthy plantation holders rushed to sell their slaves in the south, popular resistance and resentment grew, inspiring numerous emancipation societies. They succeeded in banning slavery altogether in the province of
Ceará by
1884. (Mike Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts, 88-90)
Slavery was legally ended nationwide on
May 13 by the
Lei Aurea ("Golden Law") of
1888, by a legal act of
Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil. In fact, it was an institution in decline by this time. (Since the 1880s the country began to attract European immigrant labor instead). Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.
Human rights abuse
However, in
2004 the government acknowledged to the
United Nations that at least 25,000 Brazilians work under legal work conditions "analogous to slavery." The top anti-slavery official in
Brasilia, nation's capital, estimates the number of modern slaves at 50,000. More than 1,000 slave laborers were freed from a sugar cane plantation in
2007 by the Brazilian government, in the largest anti-slavery raid in modern times in Brazil.
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