The Society of Friends: quakerism and the condemnation of slavery in Rio de Janeiro s press

• Grant number: 23/17786-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira
• Grantee: Sofia Zambelli Menck
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/00761-9 - British International Abolitionism in the mid 19th Centuries: connections among the London quakers and Rio de Janeiro s press, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

The long process of condemnation of slavery in Brazil was marked by successive attempts of intervention from England, and with the Society of Friends was no different. The Society of Friends, better known as the Quaker movement, was a radical strand of Protestantism and contributed with relevant arguments to the Christian debate on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Already at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Quakers produced moral discourses openly critical of slave labor and when nineteenth-century British abolitionism emerged, the Friends made efforts to occupy a prominent place in the debate. In 1839, a group composed mostly of Quakers founded, with the aim of observing and mediating the enslavement os africans in foreign countries, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). Specialized historiography has indicated that the arguments against the captivity of Africans and their descendants used by these religious zealots reached Brazil, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In order to deepen the understanding of this indicative, this research intends, through the analysis of the journals Correio Mercantil, Jornal do Commercio, O Philantropo and Anti-Slavery Reporter, to investigate the participation of the set of moral arguments produced by members of the Society of Friends in the extensive network of pro-emancipation activists in Rio de Janeiro during the Reign of Dom Pedro II.