A middle path: slavery and natural increase in nineteenth-century Minas Gerais.

Abstract

"This article challenges the conventional notion that all regions of Brazil...were entirely dependent upon the international slave trade for the maintenance or growth of their slave populations.... The arguments will be based on data relating to the nineteenth-century slave population of the province of Minas Gerais.... Despite the size of its slave contingent, Minas Gerais was at best weakly linked to the export sector.... In light of data from the 1830s it will be argued that this economic transformation away from the export sector had a profound impact on slave demography.... New evidence shows that the Mineiro slave population achieved a positive rate of natural increase within a single generation of the termination of the Atlantic slave trade."