Abstract
This chapter examines the process of labor rationalization and specialization that took place on the coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley during the second slavery, revealing how this process affected not only field slaves but also domestic servants. Focusing on the household, it analyses the lives of enslaved servants, emphasizing the impact of deteriorating labor conditions and a new “civilized” habitus adopted by their enslavers. The immense wealth generated by coffee allowed the slaveholding class to develop a sophisticated social habitus that reflected their access to bourgeois consumption goods. Their new lifestyle required the reorganization of household labor and reshaped the social hierarchies of plantation society in ways that outlasted slavery.
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Notes
- 1.
The second slavery is a concept created by Dale Tomich (2004) to describe the slave regimes that flourished in the Americas in the nineteenth century, above all in the US South, Brazil, and Cuba in the years 1800–1860. Tomich calls attention to the different experiences of slavery across times and places and reinterprets the relationship between slavery and capitalism (Tomich 2018: 477). For Tomich, the first slavery started in America during the European colonization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “This first epoch of New World slavery received great impetus from colonial rivalry and early capitalism, with the former focused on silver, the latter on plantation products, especially sugar and tobacco” (Blackburn 2017: 1). The second slavery refers to the increase in slave trade (internal and external traffic, legal and illegal) during the period of independent state formation and the rise of industrial capitalism in the Americas, when high levels of labor exploitation generated immense profits for planters who responded to the vast demand for commodities such as sugar, coffee, and cotton in the international market during the nineteenth century. Concisely, the second slavery represented a more autonomous, durable, and productive slave regime, “capable of withstanding the onslaught of the Age of Revolution and of meeting the rising demand for plantation produce” (Blackburn 2017: 6).
- 2.
Brazil was a Portuguese Colony from 1500 to 1822, when it became an independent Empire. The Brazilian Empire ended on November 15th, 1889, one year after the abolition of slavery, which was decreed on May 13th, 1888.
- 3.
The functional quadrilateral organized the geography of coffee plantations and was composed of: the big house, granary, barn, slave houses (in line or in court), drying patio, processing mill, hospital or slave ward, and animal corral, with small variations among properties (Stein 1957). Different arrangements of coffee quadrilaterals can be found at: http://www.institutocidadeviva.org.br/inventarios/sistema.
- 4.
In this paper I work with the concept of habitus as defined by Norbert Elias (1978, 2006) for whom habitus is a non-reflective way of feeling and acting, similar to a second nature that gradually, and through self-conditioning, becomes a part of the individual's personality. Based on this notion, I believe that during the Brazilian Empire the master class was shaping and being shaped by a profoundly hierarchical and aristocratic feeling, affecting their views of the world and how they saw themselves in the world, therefore establishing a slavocratic habitus shared by slaveholders (Muaze 2008).
- 5.
The idea of civilization applied is also based on Nobert Elias’s description of the civilizing process “that underlines the connections between changes in the structure of society [in the case studied the rise of the Vale do Paraíba slaveholders and the forging of the nation] and changes in the structure of people’s behavior and psychical habitus” (Elias 1978: xiii).
- 6.
In Vassouras, research on post-mortem inventories (probate records) revealed patterns of slave property-holding that were at once dispersed and very concentrated. Many farmers owned between one and five enslaved persons, did not own the land they cultivated, and lived together with their captives. Some of these small-time slave owners had once been captives themselves, before gaining freedom from their former masters. At the other extreme of the pyramid, there were planters who owned two, three, four or more plantations and held hundreds of people as slaves (Salles 2008). Without considering the 2% who did not own slave, the estates can be classified as follows: mini-owners (1 to 4 slaves), small owners (5 to 19), medium owners (20 to 49), large owners (50 to 99), and mega owners (100 or more slaves) (Salles 2008: 168).
- 7.
Historian William Kauffman Scarborough (2006) coined the expression Agrarian Empire when analyzing the slave-owning elite in the United States South, based on nineteenth-century agrarian censuses. He used a minimum of 250 slaves to define an agrarian empire in the Antebellum US. In the context of second slavery, however, the forms of concentrated wealth varied from one slave regime to the next, so that, in relation to Rio de Janeiro’s Paraiba basin, we opted to increase Scarborough’s original minimum to 350 slaves (Salles and Muaze 2022). Based on this index, I found ten Agrarian Empires in the region of Vassouras, five of them belonging to the Werneck and Ribeiro de Avellar families, who were related to one another (Salles and Muaze 2022).
- 8.
The coffee complex comprises all existing production structure in a plantation, but also the adjacent farms owned by the same owner or his family (Muaze 2016).
- 9.
In order to understand the structural asymmetry of master–slave relationships at the local level, I use the expression “plantation community” instead of “slave community” or “senzala community.” In doing so, I contest the notion of a community as a harmonious group and conceive the slaves’ agency as inevitably connected to their masters’ dominion (Salles and Muaze 2022).
- 10.
The Jornal do Commercio ads database was built as part of the research project “Inside Big Houses: Domestic Slavery and Family Relationships in the Paraíba do Sul and Mississippi River Valleys (1820–1860)” financed by CNPq and is included in the cataloging of all slave advertisements (sale, rent, and escape) for the months of April, August, and December 1840 and December 1850, published in this periodical. The database “A year of the slave,” Rio de Janeiro, Jornal do Commercio, 1840 (Keila Grinberg and Mariana Muaze) can be consulted on http://enslaved.org.
- 11.
The database of Vassouras inventories was produced by historian Ricardo Salles, who generously made it available to me (Salles 2008).
- 12.
Enslaved men fulfilled the last five specialties of household servants cited.
- 13.
Research on urban slavery has confirmed that the majority of enslaved women were employed in domestic work.
- 14.
Mariana Velho de Avellar notebook, 1880–1884. Private collection of the Barros Franco family.
- 15.
Diary of the Viscountess of Arcozelo, 1886. Archive of the Imperial Museum of Petrópolis.
- 16.
The slave family has been an important field of research in Brazil since the 1990s. Some historians argue that the slave family was the product of resistance, a hard-won achievement that allowed captive Africans and their descendants to maintain their social and cultural practices across generations, creating a slave identity that was molded in opposition to the master class (Slenes 1999). Others hold that the slave family was a concession, an instrument that allowed slave masters to guarantee peace in the slave quarters and exercise greater control over their captives (Florentino and Góes 1997). However, any approach that aims to produce a single, unitary view of the slave family's historical meaning may lead to false dichotomies, because the slave family could be both resistance and coercion (Salles 2008; Salles and Muaze 2022).
- 17.
The first record of a captive with specialization in the inventories of Vassouras was in 1848. The period coincides with the end of the installation phase of plantations in the region and demonstrates the importance that enslaved work has acquired in relation to previous decades (Salles 2008).
- 18.
All the farms mentioned in the source belonged to the same owner, the Baron of Guaribu. Will of Cláudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar,1863, Archive CDH-Vassouras.
- 19.
Diary of the Viscountess of Arcozelo. Collection of Museu Imperial de Petrópolis.
- 20.
Inventory of Elisa Constance de Almeida, 1860, Iphan-Vassouras Archive.
- 21.
Registration of slaves of Joaquim Ribeiro de Avellar, 1872. Pau Grande Farm. Barros Franco Family Private Collection.
- 22.
The group most frequently freed through wills were domestic workers, mainly wet and dry nurses, maids, and pages. However, when comparing the number of freed-slaves with the number of slaves in the squads, we will see that this concession reached a very small number of enslaved.
- 23.
The analysis of the advertisements of the Jornal do Commercio for the years 1840 and 1850 also points to the preference for male cooks.
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Muaze, M. (2023). Inside the Big House: Slavery, Rationalization of Domestic Labor and the Construction of a New Habitus on Brazilian Coffee Plantations During the Second Slavery. In: Le Petitcorps, C., Macedo, M., Peano, I. (eds) Global Plantations in the Modern World. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6_7
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