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

were Atlantic, diasporic experiences conditioned by the slave past as well as
other migratory flows that the gradual shift to free labor created.
Vending and Marketeering in an Urban Slave Society
The political and economic culture that developed in nineteenth-century
Rio was in large part a consequence of the transfer of the Portuguese royal court
in 1807-1808. The prince regent João and approximately fifteen thousand
peninsulares took up residence in a colonial port where more than a third of the
population was enslaved. Both city and slave society were transformed. Being a
port of entry, about ten thousand enslaved men and women hailing mainly from
West-Central Africa, landed in Rio every year, as Rio grew into an imperial
capital city. 11 Most of these African arrivals were sold to work on plantations, but
many remained as slaves, working as gardeners, hunters, porters, muleteers,
boatmen, sailors, factory workers, quarrymen, lamplighters, street cleaners,
craftsmen, artisans, musicians, artists, peddlers, servants, and supervisors. 12 The
urbanization that transformed the colonial capital into a royal court and the
opening of Brazilian ports to foreign trade increased the demand for urban slave
labor. Although urban slaves may have appeared to enjoy greater autonomy and
freedom of movement than their rural counterparts, Mary Karasch has argued that
slave life was not necessarily easier in the city than in the countryside. Many
urban slaveowners lived on small landholdings on the periphery of the city, and
11 Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio
de Janeiro, 1808-1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 45.
12 Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987).
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