Lecture by Mariana Armond Dias Paes

Abstract: Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade forced more than 12 million Africans to the Americas. These massive enslavement and coerced transportation had broad impacts not only in world economy, commerce and labor relations, but also in the framing of land ownership and property law. The writing of Labor History and the history of slavery often happens in parallel to the debates that take place in the framework of Rural History, specially the history of land property. However, the research I have been conducting in the last years show that, in nineteenth century Brazil, labor and ownership were deeply entangled and were
regulated by the same legal framework. The research focuses on the analysis of 74 court cases filed before the Court of Appeals of Rio de Janeiro that discussed dominion and possession over slaves and land during the nineteenth century. These documents show in detail the contours that the legal category of possession acquired in nineteenth century Brazil in framing both labor and land ownership. Community recognition played a central role in the configuration of this legal framework and was determinant in shaping labor conditions and access to resources. Moreover, interpretations of possession theories put forward by Brazilian jurists both delegitimized acts of land usage employed by slaves, freedmen and agregados (free dependents) and disregarded their labor as a kind of activity that would grant them legal rights over land.

Bio: Since 2019 Mariana Dias Paes has been a Researcher and Coordinator of Research Group "Law and the Creation of Dependency in the Ibero-Atlantic" at the University of Bonn, Germany and she is affiliated to the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
She is currently working on a post-doctoral project 'An Ocean of Norms: Dependency and Property in the Lusophone South Atlantic (1780s–1880s).' She will analyze how legal categories, norms and institutions of property law created asymmetrical structures of dependencies in the shared legal environment of the Lusophone South Atlantic. Specifically,she will examine property law institutions and categories that shaped slave and land property as well as the statuses of diverse groups of people in-between slavery and freedom between the 1780s and the 1880s. Over the course of this one-hundred-year period, the issue of slavery, lands and (coerced) labor were intrinsically related. Beyond the evident economic relation between them, law regulated the legal status of people, property and labor relations via the same set or norms and juridical principles. In the daily practice of legal conflict regulation, social tensions involving the status of persons and land property were translated into an analogous judicial language. She will soon publish Esclavos y tierras entre posesión y títulos: la construcción social del derecho de propiedad en Brasil (1835–1889). Under copy-editing for publication with "Global Perspectives on Legal History Series". Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte.

Discussant: Filipa Ribeiro da Silva

IISH Seminar: This lecture is part of the monthly IISH Seminar series. This seminar is open to the public, online only.