Racial Articulation and Labor in the 19th Century Brazil

Abstract

This article seeks to explain how economic and local political structures shaped the ways in which public officials articulated ideas of race and labor in the nineteenth century Brazil. Employing a comparative historical method, this work advances the literature in two ways. First, it suggests that what we have come to view as a positive valuation of blackness has roots in the economic development prior to the centralized nation-building processes. Second, the findings of this study point to the effects of intra-national factors, such as economic structures and patterns of labor incorporation, in shaping how regional public officials articulated notions of “race,” labor, and progress.