Global porque escravista

uma análise das dinâmicas urbanas do Rio de Janeiro entre 1790 e 1815

Abstract

Rio de Janeiro stands out as one of the few cities in the Atlantic
world that have managed to bring together characteristics so
particular and at the same time revealing of the global dynamics
that marked the last decades of the eighteenth century and
the first fifty years of the next century. On the one hand, its political
centrality became evident with its elevation to the thirst
for colonial power (1763), its transformation into the Court of
the Lusitanian Empire (1808) and its choice as the capital of the
Brazilian Empire (1822), the portion “Versailles Tropical “Of Rio
de Janeiro coexisted with a city that, in the words of an English
traveler, more seemed the” heart of Africa “; with blacks and
blacks of different origins, performing an innumerable number
of activities that yielded to Rio de Janeiro the honorable title
of the largest slave city in the Americas. More than harming
foreign travelers unaccustomed to everyday slavery, or creating
practices of “little Africa” in its territory, the strong presence of
Africans and their descendants under the aegis of slavery reveals
yet another facet of Rio de Janeiro: a locus of the world, in
which identities, trajectories and senses of the city were in dispute.
The purpose of this paper is precisely to understand the
political, economic and social dynamics that characterized Rio
de Janeiro as an important center of this Afro-Atlantic world
and its multiple voices between the years of 1790 and 1815.