XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Boatman's Fortune: Liberalism, Property Rights, and Enslaved Rebellion in the Brazilian Empire

• In Event: Slavery and Liberation in 19th Century Brazil

Abstract

For decades, historians have debated how classical liberalism informed antislavery movements in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, but this depended largely on regional political and economic circumstances. In Brazil, from Independence in 1822 until abolition in 1888, antislavery reformers invoked liberal ideas of the European Enlightenment. However, they could not escape a conundrum emerging from the country’s economic dependency on slavery and the threat of emancipationist uprisings from the enslaved population. Amidst ideological conflicts regarding liberal modernization, economic survival, and maintaining social order, Brazilian antislavery reformers focused their attention on the legal codification of enslaved persons’ customary right to property for the purpose of purchasing freedom, which traditionally served to promote productivity and peaceful relations with slaveowners. Examining the role of enslaved persons’ property rights in the antislavery struggle, this paper challenges definitive associations of Brazil’s antislavery movement with European liberalism. It argues, rather, that Brazilian antislavery reforms developed within the nation’s own, often paradoxical, ideological settings over the course of the nineteenth century, and political attempts at gradual abolition, beginning in 1871, reflected a form of moderate liberalism, grounded in maintaining the social controls and seignorial authority of the Brazilian slave society.

Author

• Alexander Lundberg, Northern Illinois University