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

Abstract

AbstractAlthough 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.