Work, daily life and resistance in the Ipanema Iron Factory (1810-1895)

Abstract

This research intends to make a case study, focusing on the working relations in the Real Fábrica de Ferro São João de Ipanema, considered the first Iron Factory in the country, located in the then Vila de Sorocaba, present municipality of Iperó, in São Paulo. The Fábrica was officially founded in 1810, but since the 16th century the possibility of extracting iron from the Morro de Araçoiaba, where it was later built, was already revealed. Due to the productive instability and the difficulties in the administrative management, in 1860 it was dismantled and its patrimony, comprising machinery and slaves, was sent to Mato Grosso, where the construction of a new steel mill was beginning. With the outbreak of the Paraguayan War, the Ipanema factory reactivated its activities in 1865 to provide inputs to the war. Its activities were definitively closed in the first years of the Republic, in 1895. Free and enslaved Africans, Germans, Swedes, indigenous, local peasants, Catholics, Protestants, men, women, children, Cologne, Empire, Republic, Royalty and private shareholders: among expectations and frustrations, a plurality of subjects tangled in the webs of complex labor and life relationships shared the experience of working in the Factory. It is a unique experience in the history of Brazil about which I intend to reflect, in the perspective of Social History, on the convergence of different profiles of workers, daily life, resistance and transformations in the conjunctures and in the lives of these historical subjects. (AU)