History of Colonial Brazil

Colonial Brazil was home to one of the largest slave societies in the Americas, importing millions of enslaved Africans over more than three centuries and producing a social order shaped by coerced labor, racial hierarchy, and the constant negotiation of identity and belonging. Anthropologists and historians working in this area examine how enslaved and free African-descended people built communities, sustained religious practices, participated in written culture, and carved out spaces of economic agency within a deeply unequal system. A central concern is how racial categories were constructed, contested, and institutionalized — and how those formations shaped the long, uneven trajectory toward abolition in 1888. Ongoing work continues to recover African and Afro-Brazilian voices from fragmentary archival sources and to trace how the diaspora experience in Brazil both diverged from and connected to broader Atlantic worlds of slavery and freedom.

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51,790

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Keywords

Brazilian slaverycolonial BrazilAfrican diasporasocial dynamicsracial identityabolitionism