The Great Fear of 1852: Riots against Enslavement in the Brazilian Empire

Abstract

Recent studies on the history of slavery have often started off from the concept of Second Slavery, that is, the transformation of Atlantic slavery as part of the expansion of capitalism during the first decades of the nineteenth century, which resulted in “the opening of new zones of slave commodity production—most prominently the U.S. cotton zone, the Cuban sugar zone, and the Brazilian coffee zone—and the decline of older zones of slave production” (French and British Caribbean).1 There are several merits to the concept of Second Slavery, but I mention just two of them that are of special significance for this text. First, it draws attention to the fact that the first half of the nineteenth century did not involve the weakening of slavery in the Americas at all. Actually, there was a partial relocation of it; a persistence of slaveholding economies and societies that brings into sharp relief the indeterminacy of the historical process of slave emancipation. The concept of Second Slavery made it impossible to conceive the nineteenth century as the time of a linear transition from slavery to freedom, or from unfree to free forms of labor regimes. Second, it has made historians more aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of the worlds of free and unfree labor. These two characteristics of the concept of Second Slavery seem to encapsulate an approach to labor history in capitalist societies that has been articulated by Marcel van der Linden in several of his works. According to him, the boundaries between free and unfree labor in capitalist societies tend to be “rather finely graded or vague”;