Almanack (Apr 2020)
GLOBAL BECAUSE A SLAVEHOLDING ORDER: AN ANALYSIS OF THE URBAN DYNAMICS OF RIO DE JANEIRO BETWEEN 1790 AND 1815
Abstract
Abstract Rio de Janeiro stands out as one of the few cities in the Atlantic world that have managed to bring together characteristics so particular and at the same time revealing of the global dynamics that marked the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first fifty years of the next century. On the one hand, its political centrality became evident with its elevation to the thirst for colonial power (1763), its transformation into the Court of the Lusitanian Empire (1808) and its choice as the capital of the Brazilian Empire (1822), the portion “Versailles Tropical “Of Rio de Janeiro coexisted with a city that, in the words of an English traveler, more seemed the” heart of Africa “; with blacks and blacks of different origins, performing an innumerable number of activities that yielded to Rio de Janeiro the honorable title of the largest slave city in the Americas. More than harming foreign travelers unaccustomed to everyday slavery, or creating practices of “little Africa” in its territory, the strong presence of Africans and their descendants under the aegis of slavery reveals yet another facet of Rio de Janeiro: a locus of the world, in which identities, trajectories and senses of the city were in dispute. The purpose of this paper is precisely to understand the political, economic and social dynamics that characterized Rio de Janeiro as an important center of this Afro-Atlantic world
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