“Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais

by Kathleen J. Higgins

To studies of Brazilian slavery this book adds a new dimension by showing how it developed in a region where mining was the chief commercial activity and how important a role gender played in this frontier setting in creating opportunities for slaves to achieve some measure of autonomy, compared with slaves who worked in sugar-cane and coffee-growing areas.The interactions among masters, slaves, and royal officials were profoundly shaped by the accessibility and widespread dispersal of gold deposits, the emergence of small urban centers in which commercial activities thrived, the sexual division of labor among slaves working in mining and commerce, and the changing sex ratio within the population of free white colonists settling in the region.Focusing attention on the changing status, autonomy, and influence of nonwhite women, the author argues, is one of the most effective ways of understanding the economic, demographic, and cultural evolution of the slave society as a whole.

Genres: Brazil, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really great/useful read for Colonial Latin American History and particularly interesting to read in conjunction with Júnia Ferreira Furtado's work "Chica Da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century" which covers the same place at the approximately the same time. That said, my money is on Higgins' work, which I think gives a more realistic portrait of conditions on the ground for the slaves in general population of Minas Gerais in the 18th Century. Higgins work spans greater archival depth and breadth than Furtado's microhistory of a singular woman who went from slave to the uppermost echelon of society. Both of these works, however, highlight interesting anomalies of Brazilian society - how much freedom slaves had in comparison to other places and times, as well as the potential for some female slaves (with light skin) to gain economic and social advantages by becoming the concubines of wealthy white men in this very gender-imbalanced region. It also highlights the limits of Catholic authority in the boomtown hinterlands where the making of gold took precedence over following religious/social conventions. Taken together, these two works challenge North American perceptions of slavery, and demonstrate that Brazil was a very unique world.