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| Author(s): |
Ynaê Lopes dos Santos
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2012-09-28 |
| Examining board members: |
Rafael de Bivar Marquese;
Carlos de Almeida Prado Bacellar;
Jaime Rodrigues;
Ricardo Henrique Salles;
Andrea Slemian
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| Advisor: | Rafael de Bivar Marquese |
| Abstract | |
This doctoral thesis aims to analyze the reasons that led Rio de Janeiro and Havana to become the major slave cities in the Americas. The starting point of the research is the year 1763, when both cities became key locations in the Iberian Empires due to the reorganization of European possessions in the New World. Although in mid-eighteenth century Rio and Havana had different relations with slavery, it is noticed from 1763 that the urban captivity became increasingly more important to the functioning of the two cities. Such importance starts to be observed on another scale in the last decade of the Seven Hundreds, especially after the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (1791), when a series of Revolutions ravaged the Atlantic World questioning the whole of the Old Regime. Despite the abolitionist movement and American independences, the colonial elites of Rio and Havana manage to rebuild their relationships with the metropolitan power in favor of maintaining slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, which began to be operated on a scale never seen before. As mirrors reflecting the political and economic choice made by Luso-Brazilian and Cuban elites, Rio de Janeiro and Havana have become not only important entry points to the enslaved Africans, but also large urban areas that increasingly depended on slave arms to work. Not even the political asymmetry generated in 1808 (when Rio de Janeiro turned from being the colonial capital to being the Royal Court) modified the synchronous and often dialogical way through which the two cities have dealt with slavery. The similarities in the relationship between urban space and city existed until the 1840s, which was the moment at which Rio de Janeiro and Havana began to share the little honorable title of largest slave cities of the New World. The year 1844 was particularly relevant, since the Rebellion of La Escalera in Havana and the new directions in parliamentary debates regarding the end of trafficking in Rio announced changes that would alter the weight of slavery in the city space. The synchronic analysis of this long process was done primarily through the examination of documents that addressed the urban context of these two cities, but at the same time allowed one to understand the relations between the large urban areas and the political units that were part of them. Therefore, most of the consulted sources were the documents produced by the public agencies that ran the \"city\" spheres of Rio de Janeiro and Havana, especially those that concerned the government of slaves. It is believed, therefore, that the choice for this type of documents has allowed the analysis of three dimensions of slavery in these two cities: the daily lives of slave relationships in each of the cities, the weight of the city captivity as a constituent part of the histories of Brazil and Cuba and the unique parity that has made Rio de Janeiro and Havana sisters of the Atlantic. (AU) | |