Patterns of Slaveholding in the Americas: New Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

As THE DEBATE ON ASPECTS OF SLAVERY has intensified and matured, certain shared assumptions have arisen about the various slave regimes, and these have then served as points of departure for the analysis of topics as varied as economic growth, the slave family, acculturation, and rebellion. Winthrop D. Jordan, in trying to isolate the factors that contributed to slave rebellions in the Americas, contrasted the situation in the United States to that in other areas. In a statement that few historians would dispute, he claimed that units in the South were far smaller than in the West Indies and Brazil.' The image of the West Indies and Brazil as regions of very large slaveholdings in comparison with the U.S. South has become hallowed in the historiography of comparative slavery; but that image is only partially accurate and somewhat misleading. Examining some newly available quantitative data from an important slaveowning region of Brazil permits not only placing this data into the context of Brazil as a whole, which entails paying particular attention to the complex arrangements of land and slaveownership that characterized its sugar plantation system, but also comparing more realistically the Brazilian situation to that in the U.S. South and in Jamaica. The new evidence comes from one of the oldest and most important slaveholding regions of the Americas, the captaincy (province) of Bahia, especially from its agricultural heartland, the Reconcavo. This zone, encompassing a broad region of some ten thousand square kilometers circling the Bay of All Saints, was dominated by the city of Salvador, capital of the Brazilian colony from 1549 to 1763 and thereafter an important regional center.2 From the middle of the sixteenth century,