Documenting, monetising and taxing Brazilian slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

Although Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas, knowledge of the accounting and taxation of slave-related transactions in Brazil is under-developed. We explore Portuguese-language documents showing how accounting and taxation were implicated in maintaining slavery in Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study presents examples of key documents involving slaves (such as inventory lists, rental agreements, insurance policies, and receipts) and explains how slave-related transactions were recorded and taxed. We enable important comparisons to be drawn with the accounting and taxation of slaves in the USA and British West Indies.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• document
• insurance
• monetising
• rent
• slavery
• taxation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to two anonymous referees and the editor for the constructive and helpful comments they provided on earlier versions of the article. This research was financed by Portuguese funds through FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) by the Project PEst-OE/EGE/UI4021/2011.

Notes

1. To indicate one thousand réis, the convention is to write a $ sign followed by three zeros. In 1880, 1$000 réis could be exchanged for 0.45 American dollars (Holloway 1984, 268).

2. A reviewer has drawn our attention to the likelihood that Brazilian slaves were deployed in a wider array of industrial environments than was the case elsewhere in the Americas; and that slaves in the BWI were trained in a wide variety of skills associated with agriculture, such as those of coopers, blacksmiths, cooks, and sugar mill operators.

3. Fogel and Engerman (1974, 56) cite US census data to claim that in the USA

 … about 31 percent of urban slave workers were on hire during 1860. In some cities, such as Richmond, the proportion was in excess of 50 percent. The proportion of slave rentals in rural areas was lower, generally running about six percent.

4. We commence our period of analysis in 1750 when King Dom José I began his rule over the Portuguese Empire. Most archived documents are from this period onwards. Additionally, despite efforts to organise the monopoly companies Companhia do Cacheu, Rios e Comércio da Guiné (in 1676) and Companhia do Estanco do Maranhão (in 1682), few African slaves arrived in Brazil on Portuguese ships in the seventeenth century (see Hawthorne 2010).

5. Because Pombal believed that all European nations improved themselves by means of reciprocal imitation of useful inventions and innovations of other nations (Pombal 1742, 158), these monopoly companies were similar to several formed in other countries, such as the British Royal African Company (Rodrigues and Craig 2004; Pearson and Richardson 2008). These companies only traded slaves and goods.

6. Between 1831 and 1835, 93,700 slaves were disembarked in Brazil. From 1836 to 1840 the slaves disembarked increased to 240,600 (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística 2000).

7. Available online at http://books.google.com.br/books?id=eJswAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA339&lpg=RA1-PA339&dq=escravos+como+semoventes&source=bl&ots=0o0iR5VQ8N&sig=5z6HXqPChgKg5K97qrnwbYWONYc&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ei=jc0QU8PZM8r6kQfi2YE4&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=escravos%20como%20semoventes&f=false, accessed 23 March 2014.

8. Further details of the primary sources consulted (all in Portuguese) are available on request to the first author.

9. Figure 2 does not show the date. It is an extract from a more extensive listing of details of the slaves at several other plantations.

10. See, for example, http://objdigital.bn.br/acervo_digital/div_manuscritos/mssII32_10_18.jpg , accessed 15 February 2014, where it is possible to identify slaves who worked as cooks and farm workers.

11. In the American South, slave record-keeping did not track productivity/efficiency of individual slaves. Rather, it tracked their specific locations on a daily basis, thus evidencing racial control (Fleischman, Oldroyd, and Tyson 2004).

12. In this year, depreciation was also calculated for fixed assets.

13. See, www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/CB/1809_docs/L16_p01.html, accessed 19 July 2013.

14. The illegal trade in slaves ended soon after 1850 due to two factors: first, British diplomatic and naval pressures; and, second, the massive importation of slaves in the 1840s which led to such large holdings of slaves that the need for further importations of slaves was diminished greatly.