Right, favour, justice: some reflections on the Navy Arsenal workers in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

• In Event: The formation of social classes

Abstract

This proposal aims to investigate multiples forms to define, practice and realise the citizenship in slave society from a particular case study. The Navy Arsenal based in Rio de Janeiro was the main industrial complex in Brazil during the second half of the nineteenth century. In this period, the Ministry of Navy organised the dockyards’ production arrangements inserted into the labour relations at these workplaces a social protection policy focused on saving the wide free workforce employed at shipbuilding, machines and artillery workshops. Several kinds of workers at the Arsenal based in Rio demanded for some kind of benefit to inspectors and other naval authorities through many petitions hoping to mitigate insecurities that were experiencing inside of workplace and in the daily life. Both the writing and the sending of petitions were social practices making and remaking in the real historical process. On the one side, it moulded vertical relations with the State and its agents inside of power structures of the naval dockyard. On the other side, it constituted ways of acting that demonstrates aspects of the political behaviour shared by segments of the subaltern classes. In sum, the act of petitioning can be seen as an art of claiming rights based on appeal for deference elements from the paternalistic language.

Author

• David P Lacerda, Postdoctoral Researcher (Department of History, CECULT-IFCH/UNICAMP)