Entre o “serviço de casa e o “ganho”: escravidão em Salvador na primeira metade do século XVIII

Abstract

This thesis seeks to investigate Black and African slavery in Salvador in the first half of the eighteenth century, discussing the urban slave labor and the kinds of resistance and solidarity put forth by Africans, “crioulos” and slaves of mixed descent. Slave labor force, the focus of this work, is taken as a privileged instrument to the understanding of colonial society. Africans and their offspring are studied in their relations to masters, officials and the slave community to which they belonged. By analyzing post-mortem inventories, royal decrees, city regulations, inquires addressed at Portugal’s Overseas Council, Governor-General correspondence, court provisions, as well as other sources, it became possible to trace a sketch of the slave labor employed in the City of Bahia. The thesis stresses as well the tensions, conflicts and negotiations which surrounded the slave labor quotidian in eighteenth-century Salvador, aiming at an understanding of how urban slavery in Bahia was articulated to the Atlantic world.