Free and Unfree Labor in the Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Amazon

IRSH 62 (2017), Special Issue, pp. 23–43 doi:10.1017/S0020859017000426 © 2018 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Free and Unfree Labor in the Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Amazon A DALBERTO P AZ Department of History, Federal University of Amapá, Brazil Rodovia Juscelino Kubitschek, KM-02, Jardim Marco Zero, CEP 68.903–419, Macapá/AP, Brazil E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: The nineteenth-century BrazilianAmazonwascharacterizedbyawide variety of unfree labor performed by Indians, mestiços, free blacks, freedpersons, and slaves. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese Crown’s failure to promote the mass influx of enslaved Africans resulted in legislation that successively institutionalized and regularized coerced labor, limiting the mobility of individuals in the lower classes and obligating them to work against their will. Initially, this was restricted to Indians, but the measures were eventually applied to the entire free population of color. This article discusses the conditions under which these laws emerged and their impact on the living conditions of the population subject to them, placing the nineteenth-century Amazonian experience within wider historiographical debates about free and unfree labor. Just as in other colonial societies, the authorities in the Amazon were constantly concerned with finding viable methods of economic exploitation, combined with maximum possible control over those they saw as their labor source.1 The abundance of land and confidence in the soil’s fertility sustained the idea that, at some point, the plantation system based on African slave labor, which had long dominated several coastal regions of Brazil, would also succeed in this region. As long as this was not the case, however, the focus remained on indigenous labor and the extraction of natural resources from the forests and rivers. Circumstances, however, repeatedly frustrated official dreams of an Amazon that specialized in export agriculture. Meanwhile, other goals and struggles surrounding the defense of this vast territory and the tensions 1. From the seventeenth century, the region today known as “Amazônia” has been given a variety of administrative names. After Brazilian independence in 1822, the province of Grão-Pará was created. It was divided into the provinces of Pará and Amazonas in 1850. After the fall of the Empire and proclamation of the Republic in 1889, these became the states of Pará and Amazonas and, in turn, were later subdivided into still more territories and eventually states. While the term “Amazônia” has only been disseminated since the nineteenth century, various studies have used it for earlier periods, including the colonial era. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:13:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000426 24 Adalberto Paz Figure 1. Amazônia in the nineteenth century. Cartography by Luís Augusto Pereira Lima based upon Karte vom Amazonen-Strome 1831 and Carte de la Guayana as well as maps by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2016) and the Agência Nacional de Águas (2015). between state planning and the actions of public and private actors on the ground also shaped the local reality. Similarly, over the course of the centuries, this society became more demographically diverse, composed primarily of Indians,2 blacks, and mestiços (people of mixed ethno-racial descent) who often refused to submit to the will of their governors, owners, lords, and bosses. Labor, approached from a variety of angles, has often held a privileged place among studies of the Amazon. For those who emphasized the role of the Portuguese – usually reaffirming the discourses of the colonizers – work and labor relations were “a problem to be solved”, in which nothing that was tried appeared to fit the civilizing project. In these analyses, the state and its administrators occupied a central position, and everything and everyone else, including other social actors and their material and symbolic ways of life, were seen in the light of government decisions. 2. Contrary to North America and most countries in Spanish-speaking Latin America, in Brazil, the use of the notion “índios” to denominate “indigenous peoples” is still common, including in historical studies. Despite this apparent lack of terminological considerateness, Brazil has experienced the same debates as other countries about the constructedness of ethno-racial attri- butions as well as a critique of their problematic connotations. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:13:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000426 Free and Unfree Labor in the Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Amazon 25 Over the last three decades, however, the analytic scope of studies about the Amazon has broadened significantly by accessing individual and collective experiences that earlier studies, focused on macroeconomic and political structures, had not examined. Methodologies from social history, in dialogue with anthropology and other disciplines, have not only offered important revisions to conventional views, but also expanded the range of subjects and sources and offered new interpretations. This shift in the historiography has sparked interest in Amazonian workers themselves, an interest that extends beyond the study of the type of worker considered “typical” for each period. Initially, in the case of Indians, scholars focused on the long history of legal devices employed by the state to justify and regulate access to the indigenous labor force. Regarding Africans, scholars sought to determine the importance of enslaved labor in an economy that was primarily centered on extraction.3 In recent years, they have emphasized resistance to black slavery through flight and the establishment of maroon communities (mocambos and quilombos), while still accounting for the various compromises that might be reached between slaves, masters, and the wider Brazilian society that was fundamentally built on slavery.4 Still, notwithstanding the important contributions made by studies of indigenous and African workers and the peculiarities of black slavery in the Amazon, much less attention has been paid to the forms, meanings, and conditions of freedom for the free and freed population in general. As most analyses point out, starting in the eighteenth century, the Portuguese Crown assigned distinct roles to Indians and blacks in that society. They granted the former a fragile and conditional freedom, while expecting that the latter would become the “hands and feet” of the region’selite– something that may have 3. “Extraction” here is defined as economic activities different from plantation agriculture (such as sugar or coffee) or animal husbandry and denotes the direct, non-cultivating exploitation of the natural resources of the forests and rivers. 4. The first great work about black slavery in the Amazon was published in the early 1970s. See Vicente Salles, O Negro no Pará sob o regime da escravidão (Rio de Janeiro, 1971). Since the 1990s, some of the most important works have included the analysis of documents published in the collection of sources edited by Anaíza Vergolino-Henry and Arthur Napoleão Figueiredo, A presença africana na Amazônia Colonial. Uma notícia histórica (Belém, 1990), and works influ- enced by the theoretical approaches of the social history of slavery. See Eurípedes Funes, “Nasci nas matas, nunca tive senhor. História e memória dos mocambos do Baixo Amazonas” (Ph.D., Universidade de São Paulo, 1995); Flávio dos Santos Gomes, A hidra e os pântanos. Mocambos, quilombos e comunidades de fugitivos no Brasil (séculos XVII–XIX) (São Paulo, 2005); and José Maia Bezerra Neto, “Fugindo, sempre fugindo. Escravidão, fugas escravas e fugitivos no Grão Pará (1840–1888)” (Ph.D., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2000). These studies, for the most part, focus on Pará. For studies of Africans in the Amazon that focus on flight from slavery, see Patrícia Melo Sampaio (ed.), O fim do silêncio. Presença negra na Amazônia (Belém, 2011), and Ygor Olinto Rocha Cavalcante, “‘Uma viva e permanente ameaça’. Resistência, rebeldia e fugas de escravos no Amazonas Provincial (c.1850–c.1880)” (M.Sc., Universidade Federal do Amazonas, 2013). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:13:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000426 26 Adalberto Paz become true in certain locales, but never materialized in the Brazilian Amazon as a whole.5 This article analyzes how the actions, conflicts, and setbacks in the process of political, economic, and socio-cultural domination of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Amazon resulted in the subjugation of most of the region’s inhabitants to coerced forms of labor. A central argument is that, despite the use of enslaved African labor and the official prohibition of capturing and enslaving indigenous people, successive laws and the authorities’ interference with daily life deliberately muddled the boundaries between so-called free and unfree labor. Once instituted, such practices opened the way for establishing the legal foundations for coerced labor in the Amazon, which

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