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After the Mining Boom: Demographic and Economic Aspects of Slavery in Mariana, Minas Gerais, 1750–1808

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Laird W. Bergad
Laird W. Bergad*
Affiliation:
Lehman College and Graduate and University Center, City University of New York
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Slavery in the interior state of Minas Gerais has been a focal point of the voluminous historiography appearing on Brazilian slavery in the past twenty years. During the mineral boom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Minas was the key region of the colonial Brazilian economy and the largest slaveholding capitania. The older literature on Brazilian history recognized the centrality of slave labor to the eighteenth-century mining sector but concluded that as the mining boom waned after 1750, slavery began to disintegrate. The history of Minas Gerais after the boom was interpreted as a long period of economic stagnation accompanied by reversion to cattle raising and subsistence agriculture, slow demographic growth, and the transfer of the Mineiro slave population during the nineteenth century to the more dynamic coffee-growing areas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 67 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and the Fulbright Commission for providing a research and teaching fellowship during the fall and winter of 1992–1993 at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Douglas Cole Libby for his hospitality and cooperation during my stay. Kátia Napoleão, director of the Arquivo Histórico Casa Setecentista de Mariana, provided invaluable assistance in all phases of this project, particularly in deciphering eighteenth-century Portuguese and readying the inventarios for each day's research. Special thanks also to Elizabeth Botero, who helped me read the inventories from 1750 to 1800, and to Carlo G. Monti, Elizabeth de Freitas Neves, and Tereza C. P. Marcondes, who extracted the data for 1801 to 1808. I also want to thank Stanley Engerman and three anonymous LARR readers for their comments on the original draft of this article.

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