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contrabando negreiro e a construção de uma dinâmica política nacional no Império do Brasil

Abstract

This essay analyses connections between State and Society in nineteenthcentury
Brazil, taking as a case study the close relations between the political
defense of the illegal slave trade and the making of a political-electoral
structure on a national level, in the 1830s and 1840s. In its first section,
it discusses studies that have approached the problem of the relations
between State and Society in imperial Brazil and are still influential on the
historiographical researches. Then, it points out how the political defense of
the illegal slave trade cemented alliances between parliamentarian leaders of
the Brazilian Center-South region and the slave-owners of the Paraíba Valley.
In the third section, it suggests that those very same parliamentary leaders
built up a political-electoral national structure through the reform of the
Code of Criminal Procedure, whose effects upon the workings of the Brazilian
State were strongly felt throughout the nineteenth century. As a conclusion,
this essay presents the actions of Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, then
provincial president of Rio de Janeiro, against the rebellions of 1842 as the
epitome of the historical processes discussed above.