Sidney Chalhoub

The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of the two most visible scourges of the times.

The politics of silence: Race and citizenship in nineteenth-century Brazil

On 14 October 1861, the Beneficent Society of the Congo Nation petitioned the imperial government to seek approval of its statutes. The society usually held its meetings on Hospı́cio Street, downtown Rio de Janeiro, in the evenings. The president and the vice-president of the society were illiterate and could not sign the petition. Article 1 established that members of the society had to be free and belong to the Congo nation. Sons and daughters of the Congo members, born in Brazil and of the color black, ‘could be admitted’. The required monthly contribution was very low and the number of members allowed to join the organization was ‘unlimited’. Men and women had equal rights and obligations according to the statutes, a most unexpected characteristic for mutual aid societies at the time, at least in Brazil. However, only men signed – or had someone sign for them – the proceedings of the meeting in which the association decided to seek government recognition. The main objectives of the society were to aid its members in their illnesses, to seek their release from jail, to provide for their decent burials, to protect their families in case of death and to pay a small pension to people no longer able to work due to illness or old age. The statutes described in minute detail all the procedures required to guarantee the democratic election of president and directors. Elected officials were accountable for their acts and had to present to the annual general assembly of members a description of their initiatives and of the financial situation of the organization. Imperial legislation required that the Council of State, the advisory board to the emperor and the ministers, examine such petitions. The council, composed of experienced politicians chosen by the emperor himself, held no executive power, but made general recommendations on public policies and influenced them decisively. The three Slavery and Abolition Vol. 27, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 73–87

The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)

One of the main features of slavery in Brazil was that slaves had a better chance of achieving freedom than was the case in other slave societies. However difficult freedom may have been to obtain, significant rates of manumission resulted in a high percentage of free and freed people of color in the population of the country throughout the nineteenth century. This article analyzes facets of the structural precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. It deals with such themes as the constitutional restrictions on the political rights of freed persons; the masters’ interdiction of their slaves’ learning how to read and write; the practice of granting conditional manumissions; the masters’ right to revoke liberties; the illegal enslavement of free people of color; and police profiling of free and freed blacks under the allegation that they were suspected of being slaves. The idea is to highlight situations which often blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom, therefore rendering insecure the condition of free and freed people of African descent.

The Politics of Ambiguity: Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850s–1888)

Although it seems that slaves in Brazil in the nineteenth century had a better chance of achieving freedom than their counterparts in other slave societies in the Americas, studies also show that a significant proportion of manumissions there were granted conditionally. Freedom might be dependent on a master’s death, on a master’s daughter marriage, on continued service for a number of years, etc. The article thus focuses on controversies regarding conditional manumission to explore the legal and social ambiguities between slavery and freedom that prevailed in nineteenth-century Brazilian society. Conditional manumission appeared sometimes as a form of labor contract, thought of as a situation in which a person could be nominally free and at the same time subject to forms of compulsory labor. In the final crisis of abolition, in 1887–1888, with slaves leaving the plantations in massive numbers, masters often granted conditional manumission as an attempt to guarantee the compulsory labor of their bonded people for more years.