Beyond Freedom: Stolen Back Wages and Radical Popular Abolitionism in Brazil

Abstract: This article examines demands for restitution within the context of abolitionist struggles in 1880s Brazil, investigating competing visions of work reorganization and citizenship. It situates the struggle of Hermínia da Conceição for her freedom and her salaries alongside the work of the Black abolitionist José do Patrocínio, who championed the cause of restitution and wages for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. At a moment when slave-owners and planters were demanding compensation for lost property in persons as a condition for abolition, popular and radical abolitionists called for immediate and unconditional abolition. Some demanded still greater rights and reparations for freedpeople. Doing so, this study sheds light on the role of wage labor in the uneven processes of emancipation and labor regimes reorganization that, rather than dismantling coercion, diversified its forms amid the struggles to overcome slavery as a system of domination.