Between the global and the local: the abolition of slavery in the Brazilian Empire, 1880-1888

Abstract

This project aims to continue and deepen the study developed during the PhD, whose objective was to analyze the crisis of Brazilian slavery in a global perspective between the period that goes from the American Civil War (1861-1865) to the formation of the national abolitionist movement (1879-1880). Its main purpose is, therefore, to extend the time spam until the abolition of Brazilian slavery (1888) and to better develop the concepts of the first and second age of abolition. To do so, it employs two distinct but related strategies. The first one consists on verifying how Brazilians guided their "horizon of expectations" regarding how to conduct emancipation based on "spaces of experience" provided by national and global historical processes. The second is to examine how the reorganization of the capitalist world-economy, the transformations in the interstate system, and social mobilization in Brazil and other regions of the world impacted political and socioeconomic processes underway in the Empire. By putting together these two dimensions, this research aims to demonstrate that the crisis of slavery in Brazil was not part of a fledged "century of abolitions," but rather a specific time of black slavery in the Americas: the second age of abolition. (AU)