BOOK From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil Crime and Social Control in the Thrid World

Researched in Brazil, 1975-1977, this book uses then currant "Dependency theory" and critical criminology to understand the transition from #slave to #'free labor' in #Pernambuco Brazil--a Sugar State--between 1850 and 1922

Research from 1975-77 in #Pernambucan State archives and at in a Prison's archives became my first book, a critical, Dependency perspective in #crime and #control focusing on the transition from #slave to #'free' labor in one of Brazil's (1850-1920) sugar states

Contemporary Crises, 1982

International Review of Social History, 2011

Journal of Social History, online 2017, 2019

This article originates from research on the discourse of the abolitionist movement in late nineteenth-century Brazil, which analyzed abolitionism as a formative ground for race-making in the post-emancipation period. The study examines abolitionists' views on routine imprisonment as a solution to the problem of vagrancy and a means of policing the poor in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, then the Brazilian Capital. I focus on the news coverage of the 1883 prison riot at Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Detenção, a remand prison that held both slaves and free prisoners since its inauguration in 1856. Analyzing the social composition of the inmate population at the Casa de Detenção, the research demonstrates how the prison served as an intensified microcosm of societal dynamics and became a crucial site through which abolitionists made their arguments--even with some unfortunate consequences – about slavery and freedom.

European Aristocracies and Colonial Elites, Paul Janssens and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 2005

There has long been a seeming contradiction in the history of the European colonization of Brazil; the senhores de engenho, the slave-owning, seignorial class of sugar planters that composed the colony's early aristocracy and which often wielded seemingly feudal power, ultimately owed their authority and position to the creation of market-oriented agricultural enterprises managed with considerable attention to profit and loss within an aggressive system of mercantile capital. While the sugar planters came to define and conceive of themselves as a nobility and sought to reproduce the privileges and style of life of the Portuguese titled nobility, in their origins, in fact, they owed little to the traditional Portuguese aristocracy. Nevertheless, their managerial strategies and conceptions of estate administration did not differ greatly from those of aristocratic large landholders in Portugal, except that in Brazil these reflected the realities of a colonial, slave-based agriculture which fostered racial as well as seignorial attitudes and, in the long term, encouraged attitudes and practices that proved inefficient or shortsighted. Nevertheless, their attachment to slave labour and their general concepts of economy were broadly shared by other groups in Brazilian society and as a colonial elite, they had only limited abilities to alter or influence fiscal or economic policies at the level of the state. The Brazilian sugar economy had begun to flourish in the mid-sixteenth century and by the 1580s Brazil had become the principal sugar producer in the Atlantic world. Centered first on the northeastern coast, especially the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia, and later including areas near Rio de Janeiro, the industry between roughly 1570 and 1620 grew at a rate of five per cent per year, stimulated to some extent by the acquisition of land and laborers through conquest and incorporation of the indigenous peoples; a situation which paralleled to some extent the historical precedent of Reconquest Iberia. By 1630, there were some 350 engenhos or mills operating in the colony producing about 10,000 to 15,000 tons of sugar a year. 1 A general Atlantic depression (1619–22) followed by warfare and political turmoil leading to the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco (1630–54) and consequently to a partial disruption of that

Este artigo descreve a perspectiva da elite Pernambucana sobre trabalho e meio ambiente na zona açucareira. Baseada numa análise de textos escritos por Joaquim Nabuco, Júlio Bello, José Lins do Rêgo, e Gilberto Freyre, o ar- tigo sustenta que a elite percebia os engenhos como paisagens de trabalho, ou espaços de produção que incorporavam trabalhadores, solo, e floresta juntos numa totalidade. Formada no contexto de escravidão, esta perspectiva per- sistiu depois da transição para trabalho livre. O artigo examina a presença durável desta perspectiva, utilizando o conceito de habitus descrito por Pierre Bourdieu. Acostumado aos privilégios de poder, a elite tinha o hábito de mandar, e tudo nos engenhos era suscetível ao seu mando. Os textos dos autores revelam todos os aspectos dessa maneira de ver e intender o mundo.

Revista Critica E Sociedade, 2014

This article reconstructs the social ecology of the Brazilian capital city's principal Detention Center (Casa de Detenção) at the beginning of the country's First Republic (1889–1930). Most of the persons in Rio's city jail at this time were only detained for a relatively brief period and without any formal charges. This detention center's manuscript entry logs, annual ministerial reports, administrative correspondence, and published prison diaries and journalistic accounts reveal this institution as a living theater that dramatizes the gap between legal code and real-life juridical practice more powerfully than perhaps any other institution in modern, urban Brazil. The criminal justice system provided the primary interface between the state and nonelite members of Rio society. During their time in the Casa de Detenção before being acquitted, transferred to a different penal facility, or deported, an astonishingly heterogeneous group of detainees interacted with each other and with agents of the state. Ultimately, I argue, detainees' experiences in the city jail provided them with a civic education of sorts; in this setting, inmates—and indirectly their families and associates outside the jail—learned not only how to navigate the criminal justice system but also, more generally, the informal and formal rules that governed their society. Going beyond the assumption that the incarcerated were socially "dead," this article seeks to contribute an understanding of the social ripple effects of informal judicial and policing procedures in urbanizing, post-abolition Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.