Sociedade traficante: o comércio interno de escravos no centro-sul brasileiro e suas conexões na primeira metade do século XIX (Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais)

Abstract

In colonial / imperial Brazil in the past, the slave trade was not just on an Atlantic scale. The chain of the captives' internal trade, which reached the most distant interior regions, but also the economic centers of the South-Southeast that most absorbed slave labor of African origin, formed a trafficking society. The internal slave trade was thus structural, and everyone took part in it, including slavers and drivers of captives. Documents such as the records of dispatches of slaves and passports issued by the Police of the Court of Rio de Janeiro, between the years 1809 and 1833, leave no doubt that the city was not only the main gateway for captives from the Americas to the threshold of the 19th century, but also the largest slave redistributing center from which slavery was reproduced in nineteenth-century Brazil. In the present work, in addition to investigating the structure of the business and the profiles of traders, we will be concerned with understanding the modes of operation in commerce, mercantile networks, forms of action, partnerships etc. To this end, although considering the range of municipalities impacted by the internal trade in captives, we prioritize the analysis of two specific locations: Juiz de Fora and Chapéu D’uvas, located in the Zona da Mata mineira, captaincy / province of Minas Gerais. The idea, through the crossing of local municipal sources with the dispatches and passports issued by the Rio de Janeiro Court Police, was to assess the routes, the agents, the practical mechanisms of action, the negotiations, the financing, the role of the trade and traders. In short, understand and present what we designate as a drug dealer.