STRATEGIES, RECIPROCITY AND POWER: SOCIAL RELATIONS OF SLAVER PRODUCTION BETWEEN MASTER AND SLAVES
slavery, trafficking, society, captivity.
This chapter has as main objective to analyze the strategies, reciprocity system and power relations between the lords of the Souza Breves family and their slaves, in the second half of the nineteenth century in the south region of Rio de Janeiro known as Vale do Paraíba. In this scope, it is carried out the analysis of judicial processes that involve masters and slaves of that family, as a way of exemplifying some characteristics of slavery in the Brazilian society of Vale do Paraíba during the 1800s, based on the social relations of slaver production. In this sense, the use of judicial processes as a source allows us to analyze the relations between masters and slaves and the other components of the society studied, from the perspective of reconfigured slavery to meet the demands imposed by the growth of the world economy. For the study of these cases, the micro-historical approach was of great value insofar as it allowed a deeper understanding of the daily social relations of slaver production engendered by the changes observed in the world economic context that came with the Industrial Revolution. In this research, the concept of Second Slavery becomes an important instrument of analysis to explain the expansion of the coffee complexes in the region known as “Vale Fluminense”. Thus, the alternation of scales between individual trajectories and the context of Second Slavery has become fundamental. For this, the use of a Multiscope approach, in a game of scales in the analysis of cases inserted in the local slave society, allows to generalize some social relations of slaver production in the Vale do Paraíba, within a context of the second half of the XIX century and the transformations that have taken place.