Enslaved and Free Workers and the Growth of the Working Class in Brazil

Author(s):  
Henrique Espada Lima

Since the early successful colonial enterprises in Brazil’s territory, men and women forcibly transferred from Africa were used as enslaved workers not only on plantations and other agricultural settings, but also in protoindustrial contexts, such as in the sugar mills and the mining trade and metallurgy. Enslaved people were also a fundamental part of the labor force in the urban artisanry, manufacturing, and the early industrial ventures in the 18th century and after Independence in 1822. In the second half of the 19th century, the first drive of industrialization, in places like Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and São Paulo, was driven by British investments led by slave-owning entrepreneurs and powered by the intensive use of enslaved labor. Foreign workers brought to the country, Brazilian free manual laborers and other poor immigrants, freed, and enslaved people often worked side by side in shipyards, gunpowder factories, mining endeavors, railways constructions, and many other activities. In Brazil, especially in urban contexts, many enslaved men and women would rent themselves out, or they would be leased out by their masters, to perform a variety of urban activities, including working in the country’s many artisan shops and industries. In doing so, not only were they able to get financial compensation for their work by becoming ganhadores (enslaved wage earners), but, in that capacity, they also experienced situations usually associated with “free” laborers, such as wage negotiation, bargaining, and even strikes. Some of the enslaved ganhadores were able to buy their own freedom and carried their experiences into their lives as free workers. Therefore, both free and unfree laborers of African descent were present in a variety of trades and enterprises, and the multiplicity of their experiences shaped the dynamics of labor relations, identity building, political and labor cultures, and individual and collective action and organization in the long history of the making of Brazilian working classes. The heterogeneity that defined the Brazilian laboring classes, composed of people of African descent as well as poor White Portuguese settlers and other immigrants, united and divided by race, gender, nationality, legal status, histories, and cultural backgrounds cannot be stressed enough. It is crucial to understand how the institution of slavery impacted the social and economic relations of all workers, free and unfree, in Brazil even after slavery was abolished in 1888: its legacy of oppression, but also diversity, is expressed in the conflicts and collaborations that marked workers’ collective experience and impacted the transformations that the working classes underwent in post-emancipation Brazil.

Author(s):  
Wendy Warren

In popular imagination, the history of chattel slavery in North America is largely linked to the southeastern quarter of the continent, and focused on the 19th century. But the slave trade and institution of chattel slavery functioned in other regions and at other times. One region that has drawn much scholarly attention is New England; the first records of enslaved Africans in that region (in the Massachusetts Bay Colony) appear in 1638, and the region’s enslaved African population grew steadily throughout that century and well into the 18th. Numbering less than two thousand in 1700, there were more than fifteen thousand people of African descent, both free and enslaved, in the region by 1770. Neither the slave trade to New England nor the institution of slavery itself, consisted only of Africans and people of African descent; historians have increasingly paid attention to the ways that commodified enslavement ensnared Native Americans, who worked as unfree labor in the region and were also exported to the West Indies and elsewhere as chattel slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, studies of slavery in New England, by focusing on a region seemingly relatively marginal to the greater Atlantic economy and one mostly lacking (save a few areas of Rhode Island) a stereotypical plantation economy, have usefully emphasized the various ways that chattel slavery could be experienced, and have also emphasized the broad reach of Atlantic racial hierarchies and labor systems. Slavery in New England was not the monocrop plantation slavery typical of the 19th-century US South; enslaved people in New England worked in a more varied labor system. The small holdings of New England also meant the slave market worked differently than the antebellum South. Enslaved women in New England were valued differently than in other regions; for example, their reproductive capacities meant less than they would in societies with large-scale holdings of enslaved people. Enslaved children could be a liability rather than an investment. Emancipation in the region was truly gradual: though laws were passed in the late 18th century that sought to outlaw slavery, enslaved people were still legally held in New England as late as the 1840s.


Author(s):  
Natalya S. Furazheva

During the golden age of Russian nobility`s culture (second half of the 18th century – first half of the 19th century) there were significant changes in the system of upbringing and education of the gentlefolk. In the pre-Petrine period education of the Russian nobility was aimed primarily at a spiritual improvement and housekeeping. As a result of the Western Europe`s cultural influence the Russian nobility gains new educational and pedagogical guidelines based on the ideals of Enlightenment. Main focus of the education came to be the training for public service and proficiency in good manners. At that time moral literature acquired a great importance. Western-type boarding schools for men and women appeared. The teaching of foreign languages, especially French, becomes widespread. Foreign teachers and governesses are invited to teach the children of the nobility at home. The combination of the old and new ideals of upbringing and education, which bring together the best domestic and European traditions among the Russian nobility, leads to a gradual building-up of unified educational principles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Marek Maciejewski

The origin of universities reaches the period of Ancient Greece when philosophy (sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, stoics and others) – the “Queen of sciences”, and the first institutions of higher education (among others, Plato’s Academy, Cassiodorus’ Vivarium, gymnasia) came into existence. Even before the new era, schools having the nature of universities existed also beyond European borders, including those in China and India. In the early Middle Ages, those types of schools functioned in Northern Africa and in the Near East (Baghdad, Cairo, Constantinople, cities of Southern Spain). The first university in the full meaning of the word was founded at the end of the 11th century in Bologna. It was based on a two-tiered education cycle. Following its creation, soon new universities – at first – in Italy, then (in the 12th and 13th century) in other European cities – were established. The author of the article describes their modes of operation, the methods of conducting research and organizing students’ education, the existing student traditions and customs. From the very beginning of the universities’ existence the study of law was part of their curricula, based primarily on the teaching of Roman law and – with time – the canon law. The rise of universities can be dated from the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. In the 17th and 18th century they underwent a crisis which was successfully overcome at the end of the 19th century and throughout the following one.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Salahudeen Yusuf

The history of Islam in part of what is known today as Nigeria datesto about the loth Century. Christianity dates to the late 18th Century. Bythe middle of the 19th Century, when Nigerian newspapers began to appearon the streets of Nigeria, both religions had won so many followers and extendedto so many places in Nigeria that very few areas were untouched bytheir influence. The impact of both religions on their adherents not only determinedtheir spiritual life, but influenced their social and political lives aswell. It therefore became inevitable that both religions receive coverage frommost of the newspapers of the time. How the newspapers as media of informationand communication reported issues about the two religions is thetheme of this paper.Rationale for the StudyThe purpose of this study is to highlight the context in which such earlynewspapers operated and the factors that dictated their performance. Thisis because it is assumed that when a society faces external threat to its territory,culture, and independence, all hands (the press inclusive) ought tobe on deck to resist the threat with all might. Were newspapers used as verbalartillery and how did they present each religion? It is also assumed thatin a multireligious society a true press should be objective and serve as avanguard in the promotion of the interest of the people in general and notcreate or foster an atmosphere of religious conflict. The study also aims atfinding out whether the papers promoted intellectual honesty and fosteredthe spirit of unity particularly when the society was faced with the encroachmentof the British who posed a threat to their freedom, culture, economy ...


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-81

The article analyzes Michel Foucault’s philosophical ideas on Western medicine and delves into three main insights that the French philosopher developed to expose the presence of power behind the veil of the conventional experience of medicine. These insights probe the power-disciplining function of psychiatry, the administrative function of medical institutions, and the role of social medicine in the administrative and political system of Western society. Foucault arrived at theses insights by way of his intense interest in three elements of the medical system that arose almost simultaneously at the end of the 18th century - psychiatry as “medicine for mental illness”, the hospital as the First and most well-known type of medical institution, and social medicine as a type of medical knowledge focused more on the protection of society and far less on caring for the individual. All the issues Foucault wrote about stemmed from his personal and professional sensitivity to the problems of power and were a part of the “medical turn” in the social and human sciences that occurred in the West in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the emergence of medical humanities. The article argues that Foucault’s stories about the power of medical knowledge were philosophical stories about Western medicine. Foucault always used facts, dates, and names in an attempt to identify some of the general tendencies and patterns in the development of Western medicine and to reveal usually undisclosed mechanisms for managing individuals and populations. Those mechanisms underlie the practice of providing assistance, be it the “moral treatment” practiced by psychiatrists before the advent of effective medication, or treating patients as “clinical cases” in hospitals, or hospitalization campaigns that were considered an effective “technological safe-guard ” in the 18th and most of the 19th century.


1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Kramer

Opium smoking began spreading slowly but steadily in China from early in the 18th Century. It grew through the 19th Century to the point that by the end of the century it became a nearly universal practice among males in some regions. While estimates vary, it appears that most smokers consumed six grams or less daily. Addicted smokers were occasionally found among those smoking as little as three grams daily, but more often addicted smokers reported use of about 12 grams a day or more. An individual smoking twelve grams of opium probably ingests about 80 mg. of morphine. Thirty mg. of morphine daily may induce some withdrawal signs, while 60 mg. daily are clearly addicting. While testimony varied widely, it appears likely that most opium smokers were not disabled by their practice. This appears to be the case today, too, among those peoples in southeast Asia who have continued to smoke opium. There appear to be social and perhaps psychophysiological forces which work toward limiting the liabilities of drug use.


Polar Record ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lähteenmäki

ABSTRACTThe academic study of local and regional history in Sweden took on a quite new form and significance in the 18th century. Humiliating defeats in wars had brought the kingdom's period of greatness to an end and forced the crown to re-evaluate the country's position and image and reconsider the internal questions of economic efficiency and settlement. One aspect in this was more effective economic and political control over the peripheral parts of the realm, which meant that also the distant region of Kemi Lapland, bordering on Russia, became an object of systematic government interest. The practical local documentation of this area took the form of dissertations prepared by students native to the area under the supervision of well known professors, reports sent back by local ministers and newspaper articles. The people responsible for communicating this information may be said to have functioned as ‘mimic men’ in the terminology of H.K. Bhabha. This supervised gathering and publication of local information created the foundation for the nationalist ideology and interest in ordinary people and local cultures that emerged at the end of the century and flourished during the 19th century.


Author(s):  
Zaven A. Arabadzhyan

After a century since the Soviet-Iranian Treaty was signed in 1921 authors of the article consider its significance from a new viewpoint – as the backing of the sovereignty of Iran and Russia that supported development of their relations. Authors examine the way it complied with the interests of Russia and Iran, and its impact on the bilateral relations in the 20th century. The signing of the Treaty secured the sovereignty of Iran, served as the base for the development of equal relations between the two neighboring states and opened up Iran for relations with foreign states. For the Russia, this document was a step towards breaking its diplomatic isolation. The authors emphasize that Russia had granted almost all its property to Iran which contributed to the improvement of the financial situation in Iran and served as a base for the development of mutually beneficial economic relations between the two countries. The authors mention that the property transfer clause was connected with the security of the Soviet Russia. This fact was reflected in the Article 6 of the Treaty. The Treaty set up the basement for the legal status of the Caspian Sea as a closed sea in the states' joint usage. The Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, signed in 2018, to some extent retained the special regime of the sea and reflected the spirit of the Treaty of 1921. Although in IRI there are different views about the Treaty some experts consider that it generally complied with Iran's national interests.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-130
Author(s):  
Emine Yıldız Kuyrukçu ◽  
Hatice Ülkü Ünal

Postmodern architectural products that can be described as kitsch have become rapidly consumed objects because they have appealed to the whole society. As a demand stimulating, easily comprehensible, and rapidly consumable product, kitsch has gained an important place in postmodern culture and architecture. These features of kitsch have easily made it a paradoxical part of consumption culture. After the Neoclassical boom in the 18th century, architectural movements such as Eclecticism, Orientalism, and Historicism became widespread in the 19th century. Towards the end of the 20th century, these tendencies came to the fore again within the Postmodern paradigm, and new kitsch architectural structures have begun to be produced in these undertakings in accordance with the spirit of the period. Eclecticism which has become prominent again in postmodern architecture has been referred to as neo-eclecticism or eclectic populism and has been defined as a style that ‘complexity, uncertainty and contradictions’ are expressed, ‘references from history and symbolic elements are used. Together with various historical forms in the postmodern period, orientalist images have been also used. Images consisting of stylized views of the Western culture on the Orient and that are not based on an authentic eastern depiction have been used in the production of orientalist architectural form. In recent years, eclectic, kitsch, orientalist, neoclassical forms that are independent of context and time have been frequently encountered in architectural applications in also Turkey. On one hand, elements from Turkish culture have been used and on the other hand, architectural elements from foreign cultures have been preferred. It is seen that there have been contradictions between form and meaning in educational structures built in Turkey during the period that the paradigms of the Postmodern era have been dominant. In this study, it is aimed to read and analyze the concepts of kitsch, eclecticism, neoclassicism, orientalism in the postmodern paradigm on recent university buildings and campus portals. In line with this purpose, an extensive literature research was conducted within the scope of the study; in the case study, recent university buildings and portals were analyzed in terms of postmodernism, the historical periods and architectural elements they derived were determined.


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