What is it about?
This chapter explores how enslaved Indigenous, African, and mixed-race individuals in 18th-century Portuguese Amazonia navigated the legal system to pursue freedom. Rather than portraying them as passive victims, the study highlights their legal agency and strategic engagement with colonial justice. It examines how disputes over ownership and legal status—especially involving mestizaje—shaped both individual trajectories and broader legal norms. By focusing on litigation practices, the chapter unveils the complexities of slavery and freedom beyond binary frameworks. It contributes to global discussions on race, law, and the intricate web of social relations—marked by both cooperation and conflict—among people of diverse conditions and social classifications in colonial societies.
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Why is it important?
This chapter challenges simplified narratives of slavery by revealing how enslaved people—Indigenous, African, and mixed-race—actively shaped legal processes in colonial Amazonia. It shows that the tribunal was not only a space of domination but also one of negotiation, where individuals from different backgrounds interacted, forged alliances, and contested their legal status. By illuminating these legal dynamics, the study offers a deeper understanding of how colonial societies operated and how law, race, and social difference were deeply interconnected. It expands global debates on slavery and justice by placing Amazonia within broader histories of normativities and subaltern agency.
Perspectives
In my view, the Amazon needs to be brought decisively into the centre of global slavery studies. Too often, the region—and especially its Indigenous populations—has been treated as marginal to the grand narratives of Atlantic slavery. But what I argue in this chapter is that the Amazon was not only a frontier of extraction and conquest, but also a space deeply shaped by the sociabilities of Indigenous, African, and mixed-race peoples. Their daily interactions—marked by tension, solidarity, kinship, and conflict—were fundamental to how colonial society functioned. Understanding these entangled lives allows us to rethink the legal and social foundations of slavery beyond traditional dichotomies, and to place Indigenous experiences at the core of global histories of human bondage.
Dr André Luís Bezerra Ferreira
Max-Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The uses and management of indigenous, African, and mixed-raced identities in the legal sphere in Portuguese Amazonia (18th century), May 2023, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003315735-7.
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