| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation studies the social, cultural, and legal impacts of the persistence of Indigenous enslavement in eighteenth-century Amazonia. Scholars usually understand Indigenous enslavement as an ephemeral historical process, generally confined to the early moments of colonization. This research centers on parish and notarial records as well as legal cases in Maranhão to answer why and how Indigenous slavery persisted. Maranhão experienced significant transformations around the 1750s. Until the 1750s, Maranhão was an important destination of the Transamazonic slave trade, the massive demographic displacement from the interior of Amazonia to coastal settlements. In the city of São Luís, Maranhão’s capital, Indigenous people labored in a wide range of activities, from domestic servants to fishermen and washerwomen. Settlers also forced Indigenous workers into labor in their farms and cattle ranches developed around São Luís. After the 1750s, Maranhão received an unprecedented number of enslaved Africans and initiated its transformation to a plantation economy of cotton and rice. As Maranhão became more integrated into the Atlantic market, the racial lines of slavery hardened. Yet, practices of Indigenous enslavement were deeply entrenched in Maranhão’s social fabric. Hundreds of Indigenous people captured in the Transamazonic slave trade reconstructed their lives and communities within the colonial sphere, especially in the city of São Luís. Once living there, they faced multiple mechanisms employed by settlers and the colonial bureaucracy to maintain Indigenous slavery, ranging from personal dependencies within households to the use of mixed-race classifications. Settlers constantly denied Indigenous workers their claims of Indigeneity by emphasizing black maternal genealogies towards the people they wanted to keep enslaved. At the same time, my work shows that Indigenous workers created spaces of autonomy within the colonial sphere. They used Catholic sacraments, mainly baptisms and marriage, to solidify communities. They set up their own houses and struggled to be recognized as mobile and wage-earner workers. They used colonial law and courts to claim freedom. In short, the abolition of Indigenous enslavement was not the result of metropolitan law but part of this bottom-up process of community building. | |
