James Woodard
Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean, and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement, captivity, and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas, at one point in time or another, in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves, exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation-states, lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point, however, the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro-American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two countries’ plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing – economically, socially, demographically – when set alongside African and Afro-American slavery, on the ascent through the first half of the new century in Brazil and the southern United States alike.
Until recently – and for many good reasons – scholarly attention to Indian slavery has been similarly dwarfed by the volume of care and attention paid to African and Afro-American slavery in the Americas. Over the last fifteen years, however, the study of native slavery has undergone a remarkable boom among North American historians. Indeed, some of the most exciting recent work on the history of colonial and borderlands North America has focused on Amerindian captivity and Indian slavery. The year 2002 is the key one here, marked by the appearance of two prizewinning books – Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade and James F. Brooks’s Captives and Cousins– though 2007, 2010, and 2012 are noteworthy also, for the publication of Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country, and Brett Rushforth’s Bonds of Alliance, respectively. In different ways, applying varied methodologies to arrays of distinct source materials, these books examine native and colonial models of captivity, explicating their significance in specific local and regional contexts while also documenting their place in the making of larger imperial structures and practices. The original contributions presented in these books have been complemented by synthetic essays by Gallay and Snyder that provide overviews of the history and historiography of Indian slavery in North America, while placing that historical experience and scholarship in a larger hemispheric context, in Gallay’s case including extended considerations of forms of unfree (but non-slave) native labor that arose in Spain’s New World colonies.
Looking north from Brazil – the American antipode to Gallay’s and Snyder’s area of study – the underrepresentation of Portuguese America in this series of works is striking. It was in Brazil, after all, that Indian slavery developed furthest and lasted longest, in the process shaping Portuguese colonialism while wreaking havoc on native societies. Indeed, it was in Brazil that the plantation-slavery complex was first implanted on the American mainland, and where nearly half of all African captives to survive the Middle Passage would be landed, though in its cane fields, sugar mills, and slave quarters, Indians would outnumber Africans through the close of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century and after, as Africans replaced Amerindians on the sugar-growing coast, Indian slavery acquired increased importance elsewhere, from the southeastern interior of Portuguese America to its Amazonian north. But only in Rushforth’s Bonds of Alliance is Brazilian priority in the development of indigenous slavery acknowledged, and in Gallay’s summary statement on Indian slavery in the Americas, non-slave varieties of forced native labor adopted in Spanish America receive greater coverage than the enslavement of Indians in Portuguese America, a pattern followed in Andrés Reséndez’s recent overview.
The major obstacle to greater attention to Brazilian experiences of Indian slavery has been the Portuguese language. This language barrier has been doubly unfortunate, for it has meant that Brazilian historical literature has not received its due recognition in the Anglo-American academy, while English-speaking historians have been deprived of access to scholarship that might inform their own work, as well as their students’ perspectives on the history of the Americas. As far as Indian slavery is concerned, the renewed attention to the topic that one may date to 2002 in this country was in some ways anticipated by Brazilian historical scholarship of the early 1990s. Indeed, by the time Gallay’s and Brooks’s books received Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize in 2003, in some sense the analogous historiographical moment in Brazil had passed. Today, Indian slavery and its place in the making of colonial Brazil is an established, well-explored field among Brazilian scholars and has been for over two decades. Indeed, in the last twenty years some of the most exciting work on the Portuguese colonial experience in the New World – which began in 1500 with the accidental landfall of an India-bound fleet on the Atlantic coast of South America and ended in 1822 with the declaration of Brazilian independence by a Portuguese-born prince – has dealt with the hitherto neglected history of native peoples’ roles across these three centuries.
The key work here, now available in English for the first time, is John M. Monteiro’s Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo, the title of which translates literally as “Blacks of the Land” (one of many terms the Portuguese used for Amerindians), the subtitle referring to the origins of the southeastern Portuguese American colony of São Paulo and two of the principal protagonists in its early history: Indians and bandeirantes, the latter a term invented in the eighteenth century to refer to the European settlers of the region who had organized expeditions (bandeiras) into the interior beginning in the late sixteenth century. To the so-called bandeirantes were attributed gritty entrepreneurialism, heroic wanderlust, civilizing dynamism, and the aggrandizement of Portugal’s territorial claims in South America, and thus the future geographic immensity of the independent nation-state of Brazil.
The term bandeirante – though meaningless to non-Portuguese speakers – is an important, even emblematic one in Brazil, and in São Paulo has been used in contexts as incommensurate as nineteenth-century political discourse and more recent product placement. Its appearance in the subtitle of Negros da terra is closer to the latter than the former, likely added to a book that scarcely uses the term at the insistence of the publisher, Companhia das Letras, since the 1980s Brazil’s most important commercial publishing house, due in part to the savvy of its marketeers. The latter paid off handsomely in the case of Negros da terra, for the book became a scholarly best-seller in Brazil. Originally published in 1994, the first edition sold out within a year, prompting reprint editions in 1995, 1999, 2000, 2005, 2009, and 2013. Among the book’s eager buyers were no doubt many local history buffs, adherents of what the book’s preface calls “the potent myth of the bandeirante,” in which the grizzled, suspect-originned backwoodsman of history was recast as an enterprising, patriotic explorer, the totemic embodiment of modern São Paulo’s progressiveness and predominance.
Rather than a celebration of the early Paulistas – as residents of the region and later of the state of São Paulo are called – Negros da terra offered a serious, finely grained history of the society and economy of São Paulo between the 1500s and the early 1700s that centered on the hunting of Indian captives by Paulistas and these captives’ subsequent exploitation on colonial estates. Revisionist in the best sense of the word, it restored indigenous people and the institution of forced labor to which they were subjected to their rightful places in the history of colonial Portuguese America. For this reason, as we shall see later, the book won accolades and academic laurels for its author, who helped lead the development of colonial Brazilian ethnohistory as a significant field of study, in Brazil and abroad.
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This remarkable set of outcomes was richly deserved and to the great benefit of Brazilian history as a field of scholarly endeavor. Such is the consensus among historians and allied social-scientific stakeholders, in Brazil and abroad, but even among this specialist audience, the history of Negros da terra– a history that in some ways makes its success all the more remarkable – is underappreciated.
In its earliest incarnation, Negros da terra was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Chicago in 1985, based on research in Portugal, Brazil, and Rome, and emerging – in a deeper sense – from a childhood and adolescence split between the United States, where John was born and where he attended college, and Brazil, specifically Campinas, one of a number of the state of São Paulo’s secondary cities, some sixty miles north of the state capital. The title of the dissertation, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century: Economy and Society,” captures some of the best of the dominant tendency in the English-language historiography of the period: materialist, monographically focused social history pursued with austere rigor. That the society and economy in question were based on a dogged, regionally specific mode of exploiting the labor of native peoples, as the dissertation exhaustively documents, and that this exploitation could be taken to explain patterns of poverty, waste, and inequality, past and present, reflected abiding concerns among historians of Latin America in the United States and their counterparts in Brazil.
After defending the dissertation, John took a visiting position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Married by that point to the Brazilian historian Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, he spent two semesters at Chapel Hill, where their son Thomas was born. John might have remained at Chapel Hill for another year, but Brazil beckoned and so in 1986 they returned to São Paulo. Thereafter, John experienced a South American variant of what William Sewell has called the “occupational picaresque” of the modern academic, which came to an end in the year of Negros da terras’s publication, with his appointment to a permanent position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Campinas. Along the way, he published articles, in Portuguese and English, in Brazil and abroad, related to his dissertation and to additional research in Paulista archives. Amid the work of reading, revision, and reflection, between dissertation and manuscript, his interests and approach shifted. Indian men, women, and children and their exploitation had been central to the dissertation and remained central to the book, but their agency – to employ a term very much of that moment, though not one over-used in John’s work – had not been so emphasized, nor had the culture, practice, and worldviews of indigenous peoples loomed as large as they now did. Where the first chapter of the dissertation had begun with early European descriptions of Brazil’s native inhabitants, the first chapter of the book now began with the sixteenth-century indigenous leader Martim Afonso Tibiriçá, who led his people into an alliance with the Portuguese, a decision very much in keeping with the dynamics of their society, culture, and worldview, which thus exercised a preponderant influence upon the encounter between Amerindian and European worlds. How indigenous peoples saw and experienced that encounter and subsequent transformations was now central. In other words, John had become an ethnohistorian.
From the bandeirante myth through materialist social history and on to ethnohistory: here were three traditions, each with its own literatures and approaches, each of which John engaged in turn. The traditional historiography of São Paulo had roots going back to the genealogists and chroniclers of the eighteenth century, but it was not yet dead in the early 1980s, when John began his research in São Paulo. At that point, ideas of regional exceptionalism manifest in the notion that the early Paulistas were a “race of giants” – a nineteenth-century expression revived in the twentieth by the odious racist Alfredo Ellis Júnior, to whom John dedicated a sharply penned article published at the same time as Negros da terra– still had some currency at the University of São Paulo (USP), where Myriam Ellis had long held a chair in history, as her father had before her, and was the director of the Institute of Brazilian Studies. In her own work, Myriam Ellis – who was a university-trained historian, unlike her father – updated and provided a professional imprimatur to the hagiographic account of regional history he first laid out in the 1920s, most importantly in the chapter she contributed to the História geral da civilização brasileira (1960–1984), never out of print over the half-century since its initial publication in the premiere volume of the first serious attempt at a comprehensive, collaborative accounting of Brazilian history from its origins into the twentieth century. In the making of Negros da terra, Myriam Ellis’s work represents the quintessence of traditional Paulista historiography. According to this tradition, as refined by Ellis, carrying on her father’s work while also displaying the influence of the Portuguese historian Jaime Simões, one of her professors at USP during his long exile, the hunting of Indian slaves had constituted a stage in bandeirantismo, a movement that began as a matter of settler self-defense and became a proto-patriotic crusade that aimed at territorial expansion. During the slaving stage, this view further held, most of the captives sought by the Paulistas were brought to market on the coast, to serve as slaves on vast sugar plantations, particularly in northeastern Brazil, while the society of the southeastern interior – the planalto paulista, or Paulista plateau – remained Spartan, egalitarian, and striving. Negros da terra demolished this set of constatations, showing instead that the pursuit of indigenous peoples to enslave was the driving force behind the Paulistas’ expeditions into the interior as long as those expeditions lasted, that the captives brought back from the interior were overwhelmingly bound for slavery in and around São Paulo, and that the settler society that was raised on their labor was characterized by profound inequalities that deepened over time as wealthier colonists cornered the essential resources of land, local office-holding, and labor, of which the most essential of all was labor.
These rejoinders to the traditional scholarship were very much in keeping with the materialist scholarship in which the dissertation was conceived. Here the most important tradition was Marxism, but it was in important ways a plural tradition. For Brazilian Marxist historians, starting with Caio Prado Júnior through Jacob Gorender and Fernando A. Novais, the essential problematic was twofold: to explain how Brazil’s colonial past and the African and Afro-American slavery that characterized it fit within Marxian stages of the development of modes of production, and how the two characteristic institutions of Portuguese colonialism in South America (slavery and the latifundium) produced Brazilian underdevelopment. The influence of this tradition is apparent in Negros da terra, from the respectful nods to the authorities just named to the desolate vision provided in the book’s closing lines. Academic Marxism in the United States at that point had different concerns (though their imprint was apparent too in the coda of Negros da terra). To be sure, there had been a loud, if generally unenlightening debate in the United States regarding allegedly feudal aspects of southern slavery, but it was only a memory by the early 1980s. By that point, the central concern of Marxist historians in the Anglo-American academy was the history of class society and the interrelationships between the economic, the social, the political, and even the cultural elements of human life, a problem that had been outlined most famously by the British Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm and developed furthest in Eugene D. Genovese’s studies of the antebellum South as a class society. The problem of “economy and society,” of course, appeared in the very subtitle of John’s dissertation, and there are obvious reasons why a US-born historian of Indian slavery in Brazil would be interested in Afro-American slavery in the United States, but there is an additional explanation for the depth of his interest. The dissertation refers obliquely to “brilliant young graduate students at the Universidade de São Paulo” who were taking on “the difficult topic of slave crime.” Among these students – though unnamed in the dissertation – was Maria Helena Machado, who spent much of the year they were in Chapel Hill together reading the work of Genovese and other historians of the slave South. Helena’s first book, published in 1987, made her one of the principal Brazilian figures in the bridging of the Brazilian and Anglo-American traditions in Marxian historical writing.
The sources of John’s ethnohistorical turn are less easily summarized. Some of the best of the Marxian history coming out of the US academy in the 1980s was in some sense ethnohistorical. John expressed a great admiration for Steve J. Stern’s work on the native peoples of Andean South America under Spanish rule and applied Stern’s concept of “resistant adaptation” in Negros da terra. At the time of John’s writing, however, Stern would have identified himself as a historian in the Marxist tradition long before proclaiming any allegiance to ethnohistorical study as an end to itself. John, by that point, would have identified with the latter tradition. Although the relevant works of European ethnographers of South America are duly cited in Negros da terra, alongside pioneering work carried out by the Paulista sociologist Florestan Fernandes beginning in the 1940s, John’s turn to ethnohistory seems to be explicable by disciplinary divisions in Brazil in the 1980s and early 1990s that in some ways drew him closer to Brazilian anthropologists than to Brazilian historians (or sociologists, for that matter). In his telling of it, when he returned to Brazil in 1982 as a doctoral student and visited the University of São Paulo, the history faculty directed him to the anthropology department. Indians, it would seem, even long-dead ones enslaved by figures of generally acknowledged historical importance, were the province of anthropology rather than history. The upside of this disciplinary prejudice was John’s convergence with Brazilian anthropologists involved in a historical turn of their own: by the mid-1980s they were engaged with a newly visible movement for indigenous rights in Brazil that would influence their scholarship, and his. The leading figure here was the University of São Paulo anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, who at that point was engaged in ethnohistorical work on Brazil’s indigenous peoples as well as on West African communities descended from slaves who had returned from Brazilian captivity. In 1990, Cunha founded the Núcleo de História Indigena e do Indigenismo (Center for Indigenous History and the History of the Study of Indigenous Peoples), in which John was an active participant. Two years later, she published the landmark edited volume História dos índios no Brasil (“History of the Indians in Brazil”), to which John contributed an important study of Guarani history. In the quincentennial of the Columbian encounter, Brazilian ethnohistory was coming into being.
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The place of Negros da terra in that nascent field, and John’s roles in the field’s growth and development, are addressed in the Afterword. The book’s architecture, rather than its impact or the career of its author, is more immediately relevant at this point.
Negros da terra’s first chapter opens, as we have indicated, with the indigenous headman Martim Afonso Tibiriçá. Tibiriçá’s death, on Christmas Day, 1562, is the occasion Monteiro uses to provide a retrospective of this most important of indigenous actors in the making of Portugal’s colonial presence in South America, from his succoring the Portuguese castaway João Ramalho at some point in the early 1510s to his conversion to Catholicism by Jesuit missionaries. Rather than portray Tibiriçá as a dupe or, worse yet, a knowing collaborator in the disasters that would follow, Monteiro insists, rightly, that his actions had a logic rooted in the internal dynamics of the Tupi-speaking societies of Atlantic South America. These dynamics – which likewise oriented the actions of other indigenous actors, individual and collective – are the subject of the chapter’s longest section. The rest of the chapter takes the reader through what Monteiro calls “the first cycle of Luso–indigenous relations” (that is, of relations between the Portuguese and Amerindians of the region through the late sixteenth century), which saw the founding of the Jesuit College of São Paulo near Tibiriçá’s village, the expansion of European settlement from the littoral onto the plateau, and the emergence of rival formulas for colonial rule over the native population: missionary resettlement and colonial slavery. Along the way, the latter helped to spark a sustained rebellion, the War of the Tamoio (1540s–1567), which even as it expressed anticolonial aims continued to obey the characteristic dynamics of Tupi-speaking peoples. This is, as is no doubt apparent, a tremendous amount of ground to cover, which Monteiro does ably while drawing on an array of sources, from sixteenth-century accounts to modern ethnographic works.
Chapter 2, “Backcountry Incursions and the Expansion of the Labor Force,” scrutinizes the pursuit of native captives that characterized Luso–indigenous relations through the seventeenth century, as the settlers of São Paulo ranged increasingly through the wilderness and backlands (sertão and sertões) of South America in search of their human prey. The high point of this activity, such as it was, came between the late 1620s and the early 1630s, when Paulistas and Amerindian auxiliaries numbering in the thousands ravaged the Carijó (Guarani) of Guairá, located a forty-to-sixty-day march to the west of the town of São Paulo and populated by independent villagers and by Guarani settled in Jesuit missions, long prized by colonists for their agricultural skills. This predatory activity yielded thousands of slaves (most of whom, this chapter shows, ended their days on agricultural properties on the plateau rather than on the coast), but it also had serious consequences for the future pursuit of captives. The destruction of Guairá – which was technically Spanish territory – meant that Paulistas would now have to range even further in their pursuit of the coveted Guarani and that when they encountered other missions administered by Spanish Jesuits, the mission villagers would be ready, as they were at Mbororé in 1641, when Jesuit-trained and -armed catechumens destroyed one of the last large-scale slaving expeditions out of São Paulo. (As we shall see, 1640–1641 was an important moment for other reasons as well; worthy of mention at this point is that it also marked the reconsolidation of Portuguese independence from Spain under the first Braganza monarch, rule over Portugal having fallen to Philip II after the deaths of the last Avis kings in 1578–1580.) After the Mbororé debacle, smaller expeditions set out to points north and east rather than south and west, often in at least token service to the desiderata of royal officials, but obtaining indigenous captives to be brought back to the Paulista plateau remained the fundamental motive for these campaigns.
The economy of the plateau is the subject of the book’s third chapter. In the seventeenth century, the labor of Indian slaves made São Paulo “The Granary of Brazil,” as captive agriculturalists cultivated wheat and enslaved porters carried flour to the coast, to be brought to market in Santos or in other port cities further up the coast. Nested within this account of production and transport is key detail on territorial expansion and the creation of new settlements on the plateau, for which some explication of terms may be in order. Under Portuguese colonial rule, the smallest multi-household population clusters were bairros rurais. The term bairro rural – often translated as “rural neighborhood,” just as often shortened to bairro – may refer to a tiny hamlet, a more substantive settlement, or a rural district encompassing a patchwork of properties, including large estates and their individual teams of resident workers. In colonial São Paulo, rural bairros generally shared at least two features: a chapel raised by local settlers of means, and the civil power the latter claimed for themselves or had bestowed upon them by the town council (câmara municipal), authority that brought with it the title “captain,” and militia duties as often as not neglected. Prosperous, demographically significant bairros would aspire to become towns (vilas). This aspiration was not merely, or even chiefly, as this chapter shows, a matter of local or civic pride. Rather, the raising of a rural bairro to the status of town brought with it the creation of administrative structures that provided leading settlers with access to land, local power, capital, and, in some cases, Indian labor.
As early as 1570, Indian slavery had been declared illegal by the Portuguese Crown, save in one or two limited sets of circumstances. Most of the Indian laborers of the plateau were nonetheless slaves in all but name, and native peoples would continue to be treated as partible property in São Paulo well into the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 details some of the processes through which this system developed, while providing some of the book’s most important considerations of the parallels between African slavery and the Paulista version of Indian slavery. The richness of this chapter makes summary particularly difficult, but the key processes at work were: the development of pro-slavery arguments so powerful that they became a regional and in some cases a colonial commonsense; the assertion, by settlers, of a historical prerogative to the personal service of indigenous peoples, accompanied by the elaboration of paternalistic discourse and practice; the vanquishing of the threat to this prerogative represented by the Jesuits, who were expelled from the region in 1640 and only allowed to return thirteen years later, after having surrendered to local settlers; and the winning of formal Crown recognition of settlers’ rights to the “administration” of the local Indian population in 1696.
While Chapter 4 examines ideological and institutional struggles within and between powerful colonial interests over a hundred-year period, Chapter 5 looks at the local processes through which settlers sought to impose order on their subalterns, even as the latter sought to resist or at least attenuate their subjection. Amerindian captives who survived the forced march back to São Paulo, the waves of Old World disease, and the unfamiliar labor regime that was forced upon new arrivals became colonial subjects and slaves. They were baptized and initiated into the world of ritual coparentage (compadrio); old identities were, if not erased, at least obscured by the generic ethnonym the settlers imposed on their slaves, that of Carijó, which no longer referred to anything about the Guarani, but rather to servile status. Their family organization and material life underwent dramatic changes, though some captives adapted well enough to the latter to engage in the petty theft and furtive marketeering of non-indigenous goods, including wheat, hides, and meat. Unambiguous resistance peaked in 1660, as new, non-Guarani captives rose up in isolated revolts against particular masters. Meanwhile, fugitive Indians were a near-constant complaint of individual masters of Indian slaves, but flight typically occurred within colonial society and probably strengthened the slave system. In any case, it scarcely undermined it. Throughout, as the harrowing anecdote that ends the chapter shows, violence was the essential means by which Amerindians and others – in this case, a free bastarda, the unrecognized daughter of a settler and an Indian woman – were reduced to slavery.
Chapter 6 is in many ways the most straightforward, pivoting back to where Chapter 3 left off and using tax assessments levied between 1679 and 1682 to provide a measure of the distribution of wealth among the slave-owning colonists of rural São Paulo. Very unequal from the beginning, colonial bairros only became less unequal when the wealthy moved on to new riches elsewhere, leaving their country cousins sunk in poverty. Along with the tax rolls of 1679–1682 and the minutes of the town council of São Paulo, this chapter makes able use of colonial wills and estate inventories while tracing these processes.
Wills and inventories are similarly well-mined in the book’s final chapter. While royal recognition of settlers’ prerogatives in 1696 was a victory for Paulista slaveowners, it was something of a hollow one as far as the existence of Indian slavery on the plateau was concerned. In the 1690s, strikes of gold in unsettled areas to the north of São Paulo, which was made the separate jurisdiction of Minas Gerais in 1720, drew settlers and their Indians from the plateau, exacerbating the constant long-term population loss that began in the second half of the seventeenth century, if not sooner. To population movement and mortality were added manumission and suits for freedom, the subjects of the middle sections of this chapter. Manumission, most often granted in wills going back to the early seventeenth century, was rarely obtained in fact, and even when it was it often produced new kinds of dependence and precariousness. The law, in the early eighteenth century, might represent a surer path to freedom, but it too had its hazards for indigenous supplicants. This chapter’s final section weighs the question of transition, dispensing with the idea of a transition to African slavery at this point in São Paulo’s history (the rise of African slavery in the region would occur a century later, under different stimuli), while making much of the transition to cattle raising and the production of sugar-cane brandy, commercial activities appropriate to a land that had been denuded of so much humus and so many human beings. For colonists who could not manage this transition – and most could not – there was indigence, and so “an impoverished peasantry” was left behind as Indian slavery disappeared.
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The final section of the book not only outlines this transition of sorts, it also underlines the degree to which Negros da terra was itself a transitional work, a bridge between the traditions in social and economic history in which John had been trained in the United States and the ethnohistorical field then in formation in Brazil. This latter aspect of the book is likewise highlighted by the parts of it that have already been published in English. Parts of Chapters 2, 4, and 5 appear in “From Indian to Slave: Forced Native Labour and Colonial Society in São Paulo During the Seventeenth Century,” published in Slavery & Abolition in 1988, whereas much of the first section of Chapter 1 was incorporated into “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” the greater of John’s two significant contributions to the South American volume of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (1999).
The existence of the latter two texts, as well as of the dissertation from which the book emerged, presented the translators with problems and opportunities. On the one hand, these texts offer a guide to how John translated certain portions of his work back and forth from English to Portuguese, together with valuable suggestions as to how he might have rendered into English the significant passages of the book that have no parallel in the dissertation or his other English-language work. On the other, a dozen years separate the completion of the dissertation (1985) and the final revisions of the chapter in the Cambridge History (the most recent works cited in which date from 1997). John’s authorial voice developed over those years, in English and in Portuguese, and the terminology used by historians of native peoples shifted considerably, particularly in the Anglo-American academy. How to draw on these different sources and signposts without producing cacophony or anachronism, while remaining true to John’s vision for his work?
In answering this question, and in facing other problems related to translation, we have endeavored to keep our audience foremost in mind. Contemporary English-language readers interested in the history of New World colonial societies generally and of Indian slavery specifically – including specialists and their students – deserve an edition of this critically important work that is consistent, comprehensible, and up to date. With the latter aim in mind, we have felt free to choose from among the texts available to us and to update or otherwise alter them for readability. At certain points this meant restoring background material from the dissertation – on South American geography, for example – or adding a line or two of new explanation designed to help along readers who are unfamiliar with Brazil. At others, it meant suppressing extraneous information that would only distract or confuse such readers, as when Negros da terra refers to modern-day place names that would be meaningless even to many Brazilians. The ways in which we refer to native peoples and their societies have been informed by the flexible criteria outlined in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz’s introduction to the South American volume of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Thus, we avoid the term “Indian” when referring to independent native peoples, while employing it as the description of a colonial social grouping and in cases where the text describes European perceptions of or desires for such peoples. We likewise avoid the noun “tribe” and the adjective “tribal,” despite their use by Brazilian authorities going back at least as far as Florestan Fernandes. Editorial decisions like these were adjudged not only on the noble enough criterion of cultural sensitivity; they also sought to avoid historical misapprehension on the part of readers. As Salomon and Schwartz rightly point out, the North American connotations of “tribe,” in particular, are unhelpful in most South American contexts. Hewing to these conventions had the happy additional effect of more closely approximating John’s published and unpublished English writings of the early twenty-first century, in which the word “Amerindian” increasingly replaced “Indian” as a portmanteau term for non-colonial native peoples.
Whereas liberties like these were taken with the text of Negros da terra in order to make this book as accessible as possible to non-specialist readers, some of the anachronistic “sense” of quotations from sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century sources was preserved through more literal translations. This desire to preserve the pastness of colonial voices also led to the verbatim translation of negros da terra as “blacks of the land.” At the same time, we have inserted commas and periods into some quotations, particularly longer ones in which colonial scribes scarcely deigned to employ punctuation, to make these passages more readily decipherable for readers, as is conventional among colonial historians in this country. The result is a new edition of a classic only a generation old, one designed to bring John’s pioneering study to the widest possible audience beyond Brazil. Readers of Portuguese may decide that they prefer Negros da terra; we would be inclined to agree.
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Preparing his work for a Brazilian audience freed John from having to deal with some of the more nettlesome aspects of Portuguese American history. To begin with, certain details of administrative organization and high politics, ancillary to his contributions to the social history of Luso–indigenous relations and the development of the economy and society of colonial São Paulo, could be left aside, sufficiently understood, if only implicitly, by enough of his audience to be bypassed without causing the kind of confusion that might arrest readers’ progress. The same was true, of course, of a good number of Portuguese words that have no exact English equivalent, as well as of archaic currencies and units of measure, among other terms.
More than three decades elapsed between the first Portuguese landfall in South America in 1500 and the beginning of effective settlement, following which Portuguese claims continued to be subject to challenge by Spain, France, and the Dutch West India Company. In 1534, the Crown sought to encourage colonization by dividing its territorial claims among a dozen grantees, who were to administer, settle, and develop these vast territories for their own benefit and for their lineage in perpetuity, while respecting certain monopolies and other royal privileges. The grantees, called donatários, also received the old Portuguese military title of capitão-môr, and their jurisdictions were called capitânias, most often rendered in English as “donatary captaincies” (the term proprietário was sometimes used as a synonym for donatário, yielding the translation “proprietary colony,” perhaps worthwhile for its drawing a parallel with later British experiments in the Caribbean and North America). One of the few donatary captaincies to achieve any appreciable measure of success was the southeastern one granted to Martim Afonso de Sousa. It was centered on and was named after the town of São Vicente, which Martim Afonso had founded in 1532 while reconnoitering the Atlantic coast of South America for the Portuguese Crown. Despite Martim Afonso’s inattention (he never returned to Brazil, leaving the title of capitão-môr– the governorship of the territory – to subordinates, as his heirs would), the captaincy of São Vicente witnessed the early development of some sugar-cane agriculture on the humid littoral, accompanied by the building of sugar mills (engenhos) for processing. By the mid-1550s, settlement had proceeded inland and up the coastal escarpment known as the Serra do Mar to include the site where the town of São Paulo would be raised in 1560. Although this modest prosperity and somewhat timid territorial expansion paled in comparison with the fortunes of the northeastern captaincy of Pernambuco, these results were a far sight better than what the experiment in proprietary colonization yielded in much of the rest of Portuguese America, at least from the perspective of the Crown. The generally disappointing results of the donatary system led the Portuguese Crown to name the first Governor-General of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa, who received his standing orders in late 1548. Arriving in the colony in April 1549 with a retinue numbering several hundred, Tomé de Sousa founded the first capital of Brazil, the city of Salvador, on the shore of the Bay of All Saints.
Beyond background – for Tomé de Sousa and some of his retinue will appear in the first chapter of this book, as will scattered references to the proprietor of the captaincy of São Vicente throughout – this short narrative is relevant because it allows us to clarify one area of potential confusion regarding Portuguese colonial administration and to outline how we dealt with it in English translation. Taking these issues in order, there is the fact that the establishment of royal government in Salvador did not immediately replace donatarial rule in large parts of Portuguese America. In certain regions, including the captaincy of São Vicente, the proprietors and their heirs continued to hold some of the powers they were originally vested with into the eighteenth century, through competing claims between rival heirs and other jurisdictional contretemps that we may thankfully leave aside. Importantly, for our purposes, the proprietor continued to name the governor of the captaincy of São Vicente for much of the period covered by Negros da terra, even as the Crown and its agents – foremost among them, the Governor-General of Brazil – sought greater power and authority. As if to create further potential for confusion, at different points in the history of colonial Brazil, the Governor-Generalship of the colony was split between the “North” and the “South.” What all of this means is that at points in the documentation and in the secondary literature – including Negros da terra– there are multiple governors with sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-exclusive jurisdictions, an easier issue to finesse in Portuguese than in English. In preparing the chapters that follow, we have used the term or title “Governor-General” when referring to the authority charged by the Crown with administering all of Portugal’s colonial holdings in Atlantic South America, from the northeastern “bulge” of Brazil through the far south. At two key points at which royal administration was split between north and south, we refer to Governors-General of the southern captaincies by the title “Governor of the South.” When the word “governor” appears unmodified, it refers to the administrator of the captaincy of São Vicente, who served at the behest of the proprietor for much of this period.
In comparison with the labyrinth of administrative history, sorting out measures, money, and other terminology is straightforward. Throughout the book, including in this introduction, we have included spot translations of Portuguese language terms – sertão, sertões, planalto – when first introduced; in cases where such terms are used more than once, they are also collected in the glossary that follows the text. For measures used in quotes from colonial documents (arrobas, alqueires, braças), readers should refer to the glossary. Money, in Portuguese America, was generally measured in réis, most often tallied as milréis for sums of 1,000 réis or more (as 1$000). One thousand milréis (or one million réis) was also called a conto de réis or simply a conto (1:000$000). Where other denominations appear in the text – maravedis, patacas, cruzados – their equivalent in réis or milréis is provided.
*
The debts we rang up in preparing this volume came in other tenders. Most will be impossible to repay in kind, but we would like to record them here. Debbie Gershenowitz, our editor at Cambridge, was an enthusiastic sponsor of this project from the beginning, as was Herb Klein, who was editor of Cambridge’s Latin American Studies series when we first proposed an English-language edition of Negros da terra. We are also grateful to the Press’s editorial and production staff, including Kristina Deusch and especially Ian McIver, for their help in the final phases of readying the text for publication as Blacks of the Land. Preliminary versions of the tables and bibliography were prepared by Cos Tollerson, who also assisted in the preparation of the book’s endnotes. Bibliographical detail was also provided through the work of Kevin Prendergast, Siobhan McCarthy, and Arthur Hudson, of the inter-library loan office at Harry A. Sprague library. And we thank Emma Young for her excellent work on the index, and Jeff Strickland for his assistance in preparing reference maps, available to readers online at www.cambridge.org/monteiro.
In August 2016, Negros da terra and our draft translation were the subject of a workshop hosted by the John Carter Brown Library. We were much impressed by the organizational acumen of Neil Safier and Brenda de Santiago, and thank them for having put together a unique event in an inspiring setting. Each of the workshop’s participants brought unique insights into John’s scholarship and the work of translation, and so we would like to express our gratitude to Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Marcela Echeverri, Rebecca Goetz, Hal Langfur, Brett Rushforth, and, once again, Neil Safier, for their many individual contributions to this edition. Hal Langfur generously followed up with further suggestions, for which we remain very grateful. Needless to say, any mistakes or missteps are our own.
As readers will see, John dedicated the final words of the acknowledgements of Negros da terra to his wife, Maria Helena, and to their sons, Álvaro and Thomas. We dedicate our work on this book to them as well.
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