Slaves, indigenous, freedmen and the colonial legal culture in São Paulo

Seminario Permanente

  • Date: Feb 7, 2023
  • Time: 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Felipe Garcia de Oliveira
  • Location: video conference
  • Host: Dr. María del Pilar Mejía Quiroga
  • Contact: mejia@lhlt.mpg.de
Slaves, indigenous, freedmen and the colonial legal culture in São Paulo

Slaves, indigenous, freedmen and the colonial legal culture in São Paulo in the XVIII century

Historiography has shown that throughout colonial America subalternized populations interacted with instances of justice. This doctorate project aims to analyze the participation of subaltern groups in the production of legal culture and multinormativities in colonial São Paulo, during the 18th century. The sources are civil suits and petitions that involve requests for freedom, slavery, land possession, debts and recognition of legal status. This research focuses on understanding, from this conjoint analysis, the similarities and differences in the way these subjects reached instances of justice and the impacts their demands had in terms of recreation of law, of legal culture, and of social and legal status. The Capitania of São Paulo is an important laboratory to observe the interaction that these subjects had with justice, because since the beginning of the 17th century it had an indigenous population that was the basis of labor force and, throughout the 18th century, it started to import African forced labor.

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