Transamazonic Bondage: Violence, Networks, and Race (Brazil, 1688-1798)
Alexandre Pelegrino is a 2022-23 Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of History.
It is beyond question that the enslavement of Indigenous Americans played a decisive role in the formation of colonial societies in the Americas. Yet, most people assume that it was a practice confined to the early moments of colonization. In other words, Indigenous enslavement would become obsolete once settlers had access to enslaved Africans. Some scholars said that Native Americans were not suitable for the demanding labor in plantations. Others argued that mortality rates were so high among Native Americans that settlers only desired African workers.
My dissertation Transamazonic Bondage: Violence, Networks, and Race (Brazil, 1688-1798) questions this narrative of substitution by studying the long arc of Indigenous enslavement in the Amazon region. I follow the lives of those swept into the Transamazonic slave trade from the moment of their capture by Portuguese slavers in the interior of the continent, to their long canoe journeys through the Amazon River to coastal settlements, and the reconstruction of their lives in Portuguese settlements.
Both the cross-cultural trade and raiding in the interior of the continent and the lives of Indigenous slaves within colonial settlements were at the center of empire building. The system of slavery developed in Northern Brazil blended Indigenous practices of slavery and social networks created with Portuguese settlers and racialized Atlantic slavery.
From the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century, Portuguese settlers displaced thousands of Indigenous people from the interior of Amazonia to work on coastal cities, farms, ranches, and households. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese empire faced important challenges and the diminishing profits from the gold industry in Southern Brazil created an economic crisis. Portugal was also competing with Spain for control of the Amazon and Plata River basins.
In this context, the Portuguese monarchy attempted to abolish Indigenous enslavement to foster alliances with Indigenous groups in the disputed areas. At the same time, the Portuguese crown created a trading company to transport unprecedented numbers of African slaves to Northern Brazil and develop export economies of leather, cotton, rice, and cocoa. Enslaved Africans, then, arrived in a world of labor dominated by Indigenous workers. The new Indigenous policy imagined for the frontier region posed serious questions for thousands of Indigenous workers living within colonial settlements.
To understand these overlapping labor regimes, I focus on the multi-racial city of São Luís, one of the main destinations of both Indigenous and African slaves. Using Catholic baptism and marriage records, along with notarial papers, such as wills, commercial transactions, manumissions letters, and legal cases, I created a relational database to map the social and economic networks of workers. These networks reveal the formation of socio-racial classifications, legal statuses, and the circulation of legal knowledge in this little studied city.
Alexandre Pelegrino is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation considers the persistence of Native American enslavement and how socio-racial classifications operate to reshape the continuation of slavery. Before pursuing his PhD at Vanderbilt, Alex received his BA and MA from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF, RJ, Brazil). His broader research interests include Latin American History, Labor History, Colonialism, and Imperialism.
Alex’s research has been funded by the CLACX at Vanderbilt, a James Scobie Award from the Conference in Latin American History (CLAH), the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), and the Social Science Research Council – International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF).