The limits of liberty after the creation of international courts in the Atlantic world : demography and the work of liberated Africans in plantations and public road construction (1831-1864)

Abstract

This article analyses the distribution system of liberated Africans in the Atlantic world in order to explore identity and freedom in the nineteenth century. Thus far the literature has paid scant attention to the relationship between Brazilian political institutions and the distribution system of liberated Africans. This study aims to analyse this system to explore issues of labour, gender, and freedom. The article argues that the authorities created the illegal scheme for the redistribution of the liberated Africans. The system favoured the agro-export merchant elite associated with the transatlantic slave trade (the 1810s-1830s), coffee plantations, and the purchase of road works. The article uses little-explored sources: the processes of the making of bridges and roads encoded in a database that reaches a volume of 23,000 documents for the period 1840-1889 and the list of names of liberated Africans (1853).