One Vintém of Freedom: The Economies of Enslaved People in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Abstract

This dissertation examines the economies of enslaved people in nineteenth-century Brazil. Drawing primarily on police inquiries and judicial proceedings from the Brazilian Center-South, it argues that money was a means of materially and symbolically experiencing what I call “Black freedom in bondage.” Challenging teleological readings of slavery, it shifts the analytical focus from liberty to freedom, that is, from formal status to lived experience. It demonstrates that enslaved people actively reworked categories such as value, property, and freedom through everyday economic practices. It develops this argument through an analysis of the racialized devaluation of enslaved labor, disputes over peculium and access to economic resources, property as a symbolic and performative practice, and freedom itself as a form of “symbolic currency.” In doing so, it argues that the economies of enslaved people were not simply marginal extensions of slavery or pathways toward manumission, but domains in which new meanings and practices emerged within structures of domination. Ultimately, it contributes to Black histories of freedom by demonstrating how enslaved people transformed economic life into a central site for the production and experience of Black freedom in bondage.