Policing Freedom
Illegal Enslavement, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Explores the transformation of punishment in ninteneeth-century Brazil and its intersection with changes in labor relations in the Atlantic World.

Martine Jean (Author)

9781009289115, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 August 2023

288 pages
28 x 19 x 2.3 cm, 0.639 kg

'This book is an invaluable contribution to the study of police and political control of the popular classes, mainly but not only Africans and Afrodescendants, in the largest slaving city of the Atlantic basin, Rio de Janeiro. It combines with originality a discussion of the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the decline of slavery, and the formation of an immense, modern prison complex aimed at maintaining seignorial dominion.' João José Reis, Universidade Federal da Bahia

Policing Freedom uses the case study of Brazil's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção, to explore how the Brazilian government used incarceration and enforced labor to control the prison population during the foundational period of Brazilian state formation and postcolonial nation building. Placing this penitentiary within the global debates about the disciplinary benefits of confinement and the evolution of free labor ideology, Martine Jean illustrates how Brazil's political elites envisioned the penitentiary as a way to discipline the free working class. While participating in the debates about the inhumanity of the slave trade, philanthropists and lawmakers, both conservative and liberal, articulated a nation-building discourse that focused on reforming Brazil's vagrants into workers in anticipation of slavery's eventual demise, laying the racialized foundations for policing and incarceration in the post-emancipation period.

Introduction. The rogues' gallery
1. The politics of slavery, race, nation, and prison building
2. Confinement, labor, and citizenship
3. Prison labor and the politics of slavery
4. Disciplining children and engendering racialized citizenship
5. Adelino Mwissicongo and the afterlife of emancipation
Conclusion. Slavery's punitive afterlife
Appendix.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]