And the plantations went up in smoke: aristocracy (nobreza da terra), Ancien Regime and slavery

Abstract

The article assumes that the families of the conquerors and first settlers of Rio de Janeiro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, formed a social group capable of designing their social reproduction mechanisms in time: local aristocracy. The axes of these mechanisms were not so much control of land and labor - through, for example, entails (morgadios and capelas) or through the market - but by the values of the Old Catholic regime. Among these values are: the social prestige and gifts (personal unequal exchange). Among the results of this process we are making a hierarchical society and guided by the idea of social superiority as a synonym of life of other people's work. In this context the gift practice arises as a fundamental movement, it was able at the same time, to reaffirm social promotion and social superiority, such as the emancipation of slaves. The local aristocracy (nobreza da terra) in Rio de Janeiro, succumbed in the eighteenth century, but the society they helped shape and its worldview survived; such a worldview survived, including between said subaltern groups. These hypotheses were built from the empirical Rio de Janeiro of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but seek to contribute to the understanding of Portuguese America based on the Old Catholic regime and commercial slavery.

Portuguese America; Plantation slavery; Portuguese Monarchy; nobreza da terra (aristocracy).