Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826–1865

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1902859

1527-1900

Óscar de la Torre,

Brazilian History and Foreign Policy

Brazilian historian Tâmis Parron argues in this study that during the nineteenth century the defense of slavery formed a “network of political and social relations” (p. 18) whose internal logic and broader historical connections were not the mere result of the existence of the institution. Rather, political debates about slavery were a “vector of partisan, ideological, and parliamentary relations” (p. 16) throughout the early and central decades of the century, when Brazil’s institutions as an independent empire were designed and tested at both the local and the international level. While political disputes focusing on slavery are a well-known subject in Brazilian historiography, Parron’s insight into the politics of slavery truly enriches our understanding of the process of nation building after independence (1822) and of the conservative hegemony in parliament between 1835 and the early 1850s.Echoing David Brion Davis’s approach in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Parron shows how postindependent Brazilian elites erected a nation-state following the model of classical liberalism while relying on a slave labor force. To resolve the contradiction between popular sovereignty and the exclusion of a high number of individuals, the representatives to the 1823 constituent assembly granted equal citizenship rights to all free men born on Brazilian soil, regardless of race. Slaves could become future citizens, and as long as they were born in Brazil, they had the same rights as other free men. Slavery became acceptable to a nation-state founded on modern notions of citizenship. Between independence and 1835 the prestige of liberalism as a political ideology also translated into the formulation of abolitionist ideas in the press and in parliament. Pressure from Britain led Brazil to sign a bilateral treaty outlawing the traffic in 1826, and later to pass the Law of November 7, 1831, which not only restated the prohibition of the traffic but also liberated Africans who had come to Brazil before that date. This was not simply a law “for the English to see,” Parron argues, but rather responded to the push for liberal reform and to the belief that slavery would disappear within some years.Nevertheless, starting in 1835 the recently formed Conservative or Saquarema Party adopted the defense of slavery and the legal toleration of the slave traffic as a cornerstone of its program. Here is where this study makes the most significant contributions. Parron clearly shows how the Saquaremas obtained firm support from the coffee planters of the Paraíba valley (which crosses the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais), who in turn were gaining importance and cohesion as a planter elite. The conservatives presented numerous projects in parliament, the press, and local councils to repeal the 1831 law; they also centralized political and juridical power in the imperial capital, which allowed them to make sure that local authorities would never impede the clandestine transportation of slaves. Thanks to this politics of slave contraband, between 1835 and 1840 more than a quarter million enslaved Africans were introduced in Brazil, 540 percent more than in the previous five years (p. 173). As Parron convincingly argues, conservative hegemony, political centralization, and tolerance of the slave traffic were different faces of the same polyhedron.Whereas the Liberal Party remained internally divided, Saquarema preeminence in government and in parliament continued throughout the 1840s. By then, British pressure to enforce the prohibition of slavery through the Aberdeen Act (1845) became more intense, to the point that the British navy seized more than 400 Brazilian ships in coastal Africa in these years and even entered Brazilian ports in 1850. That year Brazil passed another law prohibiting the traffic of enslaved Africans, and this time the prohibition was enforced. After the end of the traffic, Brazilian representatives focused on avoiding public debate on the institution of slavery itself, although this was no longer feasible after slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865. Brazil was left as the only slave-holding nation in the hemisphere after a decades-long defense of the peculiar institution and its traffic, based not only on simple economic necessity but also on the hypocrisy of the abolitionist movement or on Christian doctrine, which allegedly tolerated slavery.Parron’s discussion of political debates in different institutional spaces is very meticulous and constantly bridges the gaps in the existing bibliography. He even brings slave agency into the political discussion by analyzing the impact of slave revolts, although sometimes we miss a more in-depth treatment, beyond episodic events, of how slave resistance impacted the politics of slavery. Overall, however, Parron’s study not only contributes to the study of Brazilian imperial politics but also illuminates the unexpected connections between the politics of slavery and the political, partisan, administrative, and international conflicts of the period.