Free and freed Afro-descendants and political equality in Portuguese America

Change of status, slavery and Atlantic perspective (1750-1840)

Resumen

I propose in this article that free and freed Afro-descendants of three
colonial empires of the modern era, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the
French, have developed differentiated demands in different procedural
steps: the ones that aimed privileges during the old or oligarchic type
society, and the ones which demanded political and civil equality during
the formation process of the democratic and representative type society.
I analyze this aspect from connection plans, structural regularities and
recurrences that suggest that the social position of those individuals and
their social group in the referred colonial empires is consequence, on the
one hand, of diachronic aspects relating to slavery and, on the other hand,
synchronous social processes, own to the specific temporality of the 18th
and 19th Centuries, such as the transition from one to another kind of
society. To do so, I use concepts drawn from sociology and anthropology,
such as the social representation and the freedom-slavery continuum.