ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SLAVE LEGACIES, AMBIVALENT ...

For example, the royal decree of 1810, which suspended the preexisting law that
prohibited petty commerce in Rio‟s private households and the street, permitted
slave-owners to engage their slaves in commercial activities that generated
income. 7 Thereafter, escravos ao ganho became an increasing presence on the
streets of Rio in the course of the nineteenth century. The year 1850 marked the
end of the trans-Atlantic importation of enslaved Africans into Brazil,
transforming the eventual abolition of slavery into a virtual certainty. 8 It was in
1871, with the passage of the Free Womb Law, that the abolition of slavery
became even more imminent, although this was not the desirable outcome for
many political elites and property owners of the era. The Free Womb Law not
only freed the newborn children of slaves (and enslaved women‟s wombs), but
also contained clauses regarding slave wages and the nature of contract wage
labor, making it an important document for analyzing Brazil‟s gradual and
problematic turn to universal citizenship and free labor. 9 Throughout the
nineteenth century, street commerce was an area of urban slavery particularly
vulnerable to the demographic and legal changes resulting from Brazil‟s policy of
gradual emancipation.
7 Carlos Kessel and Karen Worcman, Um balcão na capital: memórias do comércio na cidade do
Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Editora SENAC, 2003), 14.
8 The slave trade between Rio and Africa was legally abolished in 1831 but continued, de facto,
for another twenty years. As opposed to the United States, which internally reproduced its slave
population, Brazil relied more on the ongoing imports of enslaved Africans for the maintenance of
its plantation economy. One consequence of this was the much larger free population of color in
Brazil than in the United States. Manumission rates were higher in Brazil partly due to plantation
slaveholders‟ dependence on and preference for newly imported enslaved Africans.
9 Keila Grinberg, “Slavery, liberalism, and civil law: definitions of status and citizenship in the
elaboration of the Brazilian civil code (1855-1916),” in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin
America, ed. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005).
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