Vol. 2 No. 4 (2023): Political power in a slave-owning country: slave trade, slavery and slave resistance

For more than three hundred years, the slavery of Africans and their descendants was the main form of labor in the colony and in the Brazilian plagas. Portuguese America also had a demographic configuration composed of people brought from Africa, and many of these were put to work in the most varied labors, thus fostering the Brazilian slave system. However, threats began to emerge in the first half of the 19th century that would put the Brazilian slave system in check, one of which was the English anti-slavery pressure.
This dossier aims to bring together completed or ongoing research on themes involving the enslavement of Africans and/or their descendants, within the time frame of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the second half of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery pressure increased, but at that time, the pressure was linked to factors occurring within Brazil's own territory. Thus, what was possible to observe was the rise of the abolitionist movement and the effervescence of the actions of the slaves themselves, which were configured through escapes, refusal to work and/or the purchase of their letter of freedom.

In addition, it is proposed to incorporate research that points to the agency of the slave in building his own history. In this conception, the problems that point to the dynamics of the slave trade, the different forms of resistance practiced by slaves, the particular insertion of female slaves, freed or in the process of emancipation in the framework of slavery, the diseases that claimed the lives of slaves, the healing practices carried out by them, the importance of African and Afro-descendant women in economic and social dynamics within the context of slavery, studies on slavery in cities and in the countryside, were invited to be part of this dossier.

Thus, the aim is to bring together studies that deal with the most varied themes that address slavery in the eighteenth and eighteenth centuries. With this, we hope to foster discussions about the particularities of the experience and dynamics of slaves within slave Brazil, in order to enable discussions of slave transits, Social History, slave resistance, their sociabilities and political power.