Slavery in the Age of Emancipation: Victims and Rebels in Brazil’s Late 19th-Century Domestic Trade

Abstract

The trajectory from slavery to freedom is generally told in linear fashion, yet for thousands of Black people in the Americas, the last decades of slavery were a time of expanding bondage. In Brazil, an internal slave trade shifted over 200,000 people from struggling northeastern plantations to the south-central region, where commercial coffee agriculture was quickly becoming the nation’s principal export sector. Scholars are increasingly exploring the ways in which African descendants became agents of their own freedom in the Atlantic world, but such agency is less visible among the victims of domestic slave trades.