Punishment and social structure in slave-owning Brazil: the public and the private in the reproduction of order.

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 2: Histories of Race, Gender and Vulnerable Groups

Abstract

Slavery determined specific forms of punishment. In colonial Brazil, the penal system acted in a double way, in an official regime of little practical impact for the free population and a parallel system of unofficial punishments for the enslaved population. In Colonial Brazil, the concrete relations of the slave society show the coexistence of a private punitive power alongside a public system of punishment. The differences between rural and urban slavery, as well as the political, social and fatal transformations in the period that goes from the discovery of Brazil to the inauguration of the first modern prison (1500-1850) reveal how the constituted powers adopt their own punitive forms for reproduction of the slave order. The movement that started with corporal punishment in private environments in the rural areas of the colony demands the non-use of prison sentences and the death penalty. However, with the development of urban slavery, new punitive practices were imposed and culminated in the entry of the police into Brazil (1809), after the arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family in Rio de Janeiro. With the independence of Brazil, new ones occurred and, now, prison and death sentences, which were previously incompatible with the slave system, are presented as a necessity for its maintenance. The study proposes a materialist analysis of the transformations of punitive practices in slave-owning Brazil.

Author

• PATRICK CACICEDO, University of São Paulo