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

etween Africa and Brazil, in 1850, and culminated in final and summary
emancipation for all slaves in May 1888. 2
The turn to the social history of slavery that took off in the 1980s
produced a significant number of works that examined urban slave society in
Brazil. The ganho system featured prominently in this literature. Douglass Cole
Libby, a specialist in slavery in Minas Gerais, identified the ganho system as
being characterized by the “classical attribute” of free labor – individual
mobility. 3 Yet, as Marilene Rosa Nogueira da Silva has argued, the ganho system
was founded on a contradiction. One the one hand, ganhadores became essential
providers in urban slave society as the city grew and demand for transportation,
commerce, and manufacturing increased. On the other hand, when the slave “left
the slave barracks and enter[ed] the streets” he became “necessary, feared, and
despised.” 4 The ganho system was integral to the maintenance of the urban slave
society and economy, but it was also a liminal space within the traditional slave
structure. Individual mobility not only characterized the enslaved ganahdor, but
the ability to bargain for wages in exchange for labor power further positioned the
urban street slave at the crossroads of slave and free labor. Nogueira da Silva
described the ganho system as a breach that was itself a consequence of dominant
2 Starting with the abolition of the slave trade between Rio and West Africa in 1831, during the
second half of the nineteenth century, between 1850 and 1888, Brazilian authorities gradually
approved anti-slavery laws, ending the slave trade between Africa and Brazil in 1851, freeing the
children of enslaved mothers in 1871, freeing all slaves over the age of 65 in 1885, and finally
abolishing slavery in 1888.
3 Douglass Cole Libby, Escravo e capital estrangeiro no Brasil; o caso de Morro Velho. (Belo
Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1984). Quoted in Marilene Rosa Nogueira da Silva, Negro na rua: A nova
face da escravidão (São Paulo: Editora HUCITEC, 1988), 90. Nogueira da Silva‟s work is in
dialogue with Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities of the South, 1820-1860 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
4 Nogueira, Negro na rua, 91.
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