Routine Imprisonment, Race, and Citizenship in 19th Century Brazil, 1830–1890

FAIN: FT-259642-18

Martine Jean, PhD
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)

A book length study on the development of prisons in Brazil between 1830 and 1890.

My monograph, "Routine Imprisonment, Race, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1830-1890," investigates the birth of the prison in Brazil with a focus on Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção, the city’s penitentiary, and the Casa de Detenção, a remand prison, from 1830 to 1890. This era spans the post-independence period, the termination of the slave trade in 1850, and the protracted emancipation process that culminated in the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the Empire (1822-1889). The research highlights the seeming paradox that Brazil’s construction of the Casa de Correção represents in the global history of the penitentiary which is associated with industrializing societies and free wage labor whereas slavery was the basis of the Brazilian economy until 1888.

Associated Products

Free Africans, Slaves, and Convict Labor in the Construction of Rio de Janeiro’s Correction House: Atlantic Labor Regimes and Confinement in Brazil’s Atlantic Port City (Article)
Title: Free Africans, Slaves, and Convict Labor in the Construction of Rio de Janeiro’s Correction House: Atlantic Labor Regimes and Confinement in Brazil’s Atlantic Port City
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: ABSTRACT: From 1834 to 1850, Latin America’s first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil’s eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government’s intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio’s labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www-cambridge-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/liberated-africans-slaves-and-convict-labor-in-the-construction-of-rio-de-janeiros-casa-de-correcao-atlantic-labor-regimes-and-confinement-in
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Review of Social History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Policing Freedom: Illegal Enslavement, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Book)
Title: Policing Freedom: Illegal Enslavement, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Author: Martine Jean
Editor: George Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, Cecelia Cancelaro
Abstract: Policing Freedom uses the case study of Brazil's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção, to explore how the Brazilian government used incarceration and enforced labor to control the prison population during the foundational period of Brazilian state formation and postcolonial nation building. Placing this penitentiary within the global debates about the disciplinary benefits of confinement and the evolution of free labor ideology, Martine Jean illustrates how Brazil's political elites envisioned the penitentiary as a way to discipline the free working class. While participating in the debates about the inhumanity of the slave trade, philanthropists and lawmakers, both conservative and liberal, articulated a nation-building discourse that focused on reforming Brazil's vagrants into workers in anticipation of slavery's eventual demise, laying the racialized foundations for policing and incarceration in the post-emancipation period.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/policing-freedom/D23B47AC15197D0C79ECEA4ECAC31401
Primary URL Description: Cambridge University Press website
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781009289146
Copy sent to NEH?: No

“Slavery, Nation, and Prison Building in Postcolonial Brazil” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Slavery, Nation, and Prison Building in Postcolonial Brazil”
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: “Slavery, Nation, and Prison Building” is the first chapter of my book manuscript on the construction of the penitentiary in Brazil. Entitled, Routine Imprisonment, Race, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1830-1890, the book investigates the birth of the prison in Brazil with a focus on Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção, the city’s penitentiary, and the Casa de Detenção, a remand prison, from 1830 to 1890. This era spans the post-independence period, the termination of the slave trade in 1850, and the protracted emancipation process that culminated in the abolition of slavery in 1888.
Date Range: November, 2019
Location: Cambridge, MA
Primary URL: https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/martine-jean

Confinement, Labor, and Citizenship in the Construction of Rio’s Casa de Correção, 1830-1890,” at the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Confinement, Labor, and Citizenship in the Construction of Rio’s Casa de Correção, 1830-1890,” at the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA),
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: This presentation discusses my research on the construction of Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção at BRASA’s conference in July 2018. My paper is based on chapter 2 of my book manuscript in which I analyze the utilization of slaves, free Africans, and prisoners to build Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção between 1830 and 1850. The presentation will also include a discussion of the construction of the Casa de Detenção between 1850 and 1862 using primarily free wage workers and free Africans. The research engages with two important themes of the historiography of 19th century Brazil: labor and citizenship. My analysis of the slave and free labor force used to build the penitentiary demonstrates how authorities deployed the need for inexpensive labor to control refractory elements of both enslaved and the free poor. This was done by utilizing convicts and slave prisoners as well as vagrants summarily taken off the streets to build the Casa de Correção. I examine in particular the utilization of the construction site of the Casa de Correção as the location for keeping free Africans in protective custody between 1834 and 1864. The story of the liberated Africans at the Casa de Correção is significant because they were put to work in the construction of the prison, a measure which showed Brazil’s participation in the apprenticeship labor regimes of the Atlantic in the age of abolitionism. While ostensibly discussing the construction of the penitentiary, my paper also addresses the utilization of free and enslaved workers as well as the significance of confinement in the urbanization of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. I provide a discrete analysis of the social origins of the prison population who were used as convict labor and suggests new pathways for researching the formation of Rio’s working-class in the nineteenth century.
Date Range: 07/2018
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Secondary URL: https://brasa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/BRASA-XIV-Program.pdf

“Apprenticeship, Penal Servitude, and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”, Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Apprenticeship, Penal Servitude, and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”, Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: This seminar presents research from my book manuscript entitled Routine Imprisonment: Race and Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Brazil, 1830-1890, which charts the Brazilian government’s imposition of the rule of law using incarceration and involuntary labor as a mean of wrestling penal and administrative control over Rio’s itinerant populations in the nineteenth-century. Tracing the decision to build the Casa de Correção in the global debates about the disciplinary benefits of confinement and the evolution of free labor ideology, the research demonstrates how Brazil’s political elites envisioned adopting the penitentiary to discipline the free working class. While participating in the global debates about the inhumanity of the slave trade, philanthropists and lawmakers of both conservative and liberal strands articulated a nation-building discourse that focused on reforming Brazil’s vagrants into workers in anticipation of slavery’s eventual demise. In the midst of building the Casa de Correção, authorities wrestled with the tentacles of the illegal slave trade, which delivered thousands of new slaves to Brazil in open violation of the nation’s laws and international treaties to curb the traffic. While traffickers traded most of the new slaves into the interior, thousands circulated in Rio and posed a pressing challenge to public order in the slave society. The police considered the presence of illegally enslaved Africans in the urban population dangerous because they were often indistinguishable from runaway slaves and their ubiquitous existence revealed the limit of state authority over the country’s borders.
Date Range: 04/2019
Location: Cambridge, MA
Primary URL: https://alari.fas.harvard.edu/event/seminar-series-apprenticeship-penal-servitude-and-precariousness-freedom

“Confronting Corporate Ownership of Bound Labor in Early Modern European Empires: A Primary Source Workshop” Omohundro Institute Annual Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Confronting Corporate Ownership of Bound Labor in Early Modern European Empires: A Primary Source Workshop” Omohundro Institute Annual Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: Does Corporate Ownership of Bound Labor Function as a type of Total Institution? Between 1821 and 1864, the Brazilian state distributed thousands of liberated Africans to public institutions to utilize as bound laborers in public works such as railroad constructions, street paving, the repair of water fountains, foundries, prison constructions, navy and military arsenals among others. The term liberated Africans refer to the estimated 11000 slaves who were emancipated from the traffic by the Mixed Commission Court in Rio and Brazilian judicial authorities between 1821 and 1845. This is a small subset of the estimated 700 000 slaves who entered Brazil between 1831 and 1850 when the government began to actively prohibit illegal slave trading along its shores. Still, between 1850 and 1863, there were various contraband landings that resulted in the emancipation of hundreds of enslaved Africans. The consignment of liberated Africans to public institutions – and to private employers – was based on local laws and the bi-lateral treaties with England to curb the traffic between 1818 and 1835. These legal strictures submitted the emancipated to a fourteen year apprenticeship after which they could gain “full freedom” providing that they demonstrated their ability to live as “free men” and women. The document which I present here originates from my research into petitions by liberated Africans for “full freedom” between 1860 and 1864. The record offers a window onto the historical trajectory of corporate bound labor beyond the eighteenth-century to bring it in conversation with abolitionism and the changing labor regimes of the Atlantic, as well as research on gender, sexuality, and discipline in “total institutions.”
Date Range: June, 2019
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Primary URL: https://oieahc.wm.edu/events/oi-2019-annual-conference/saturday-june-15-2019/

“From Gas to Electric Illumination in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro: Liberated Africans and the Barão de Mauá’s Capitalist Ascent” in multi-session panel entitled Infrastructures of Privilege in Imperial Brazil, American Historical Association Annual (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “From Gas to Electric Illumination in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro: Liberated Africans and the Barão de Mauá’s Capitalist Ascent” in multi-session panel entitled Infrastructures of Privilege in Imperial Brazil, American Historical Association Annual
Author: Martine Jean
Abstract: On March 30, 1860, Irineu Evangelista de Souza, known as Barão de Mauá, petitioned the Brazilian Government for a license to modernize Rio’s system of illumination from gas to electricity. At the time, Mauá was the owner of Rio’s Gas Illumination Company and Brazil’s most important industrialist with investments in the country’s railroad system, the Telegraph Company, docks and other infrastructures associated with modernity and incontestably vital to the “public good.” Mauá offered to pay for the cost of placing wires around various posts in Rio’s streets at his own expense to remove the dangers that resulted from the utilization of gas in public lightning. The Light Company allowed for greater security at night as it illuminated alleys and streets in the Brazilian capital. The railroad system linked Rio’s harbor with the coffee producing hinterland in the transport of commodities, and the Telegraph Company eventually stringed together disparate regions while reducing the communication lines between Brazil and the North Atlantic economies. This presentation probes how the Brazilian government facilitated Mauá’s various business endeavors between 1850 and 1870 focusing on the utilization of involuntary workers, primarily liberated Africans, in placing light posts in Rio, filling the city’s lamps with gas, placing railroad tracks, and maintaining the telegraph lines around the capital. The objective is to probe how entrepreneurs such as Mauá who are associated with the spirit of capitalism built projects that were premised on the notion of a “public good” while amassing considerable wealth that consolidated their ascent as a modern, industrialists, and political elite distinct from backward planters rooted in plantation slavery.
Date Range: January 2020
Location: New York, New York
Primary URL: https://aha.confex.com/aha/2020/webprogram/Session20715.html

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