Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited

HE history of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil is usually associated with the coffee economy of the centralsouthern region of the country, particularly in the Provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Minas Gerais. In the three decades following 1850 and the closing of the African slave trade, slaves were transferred from the southern and northeastern provinces to the coffee region on such a scale that the three major coffee provinces alone had almost two-thirds of the empire's slave population in the year before abolition. Inside the coffee region itself, a similar movement took place. In the last years of slavery, about 90 percent of the slaves of Sao Paulo lived in the coffee districts and, of those, almost all were employed in the coffee fields. A similar, if less spectacular, trend occurred in Rio de Janeiro Province. For Minas Gerais-which had by far the largest slave population of the empire throughout the century-very little research has been done. While most Mineiro historians seem to have been charmed by the splendor of the golden age, the majority of the historians of slavery in Brazil-Brazilians and Brazilianists-have been content with projecting onto nineteenth-cenltury Minas findings about Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The main lines of the existing interpretation can be summarized as follows: in the eighteenth century, owing to the gold and diamond rushes, a large contingent of slaves was gathered in Minas Gerais. As the mining