Seditious Spaces
Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil

The first book-length study of the Tailor's Conspiracy of 1798, an anti-racist, anti-colonial resistance plot in colonial Brazil.

Greg L. Childs (Author)

9781316515594, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 March 2025

264 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.525 kg

'Seditious Spaces makes important contributions to our understanding of colonial resistance and slavery in late eighteenth-century Brazil. While it adds a much-needed in-depth study of the Tailors' Conspiracy accessible to both specialists and general readers in English, the book's insights about space, race, and resistance have broader implications for understanding the dynamics of resistance in the Atlantic World.' Leonardo Barleta, The American Historical Review

Seditious Spaces tells the story of the Tailor's Conspiracy, an anti-colonial, anti-racist plot in Bahia, Brazil that involved over thirty people of African descent and one dozen whites. On August 12, 1798, the plot was announced to residents through bulletins posted in public spaces across the city demanding racial equality, the end of slavery, and increases to soldiers' pay: an act that transformed the conspiracy into a case of sedition. Routinely acknowledged by experts as one of the first expressions of Brazilian independence, the conspiracy was the product of groups of men with differing statuses and agendas who came together and constructed a rebellion. In this first book-length study on the conspiracy in English, Greg L. Childs sheds light on how relations between freed people, slaves, soldiers, officers, market women, and others structured political life in Bahia, and how the conspirators drew on these structures to plot, help, and heal each other through the resistance.

Introduction
Part I. Imperial Warfare: 1. Avoiding the war
2. Insurgency and the empire
Part II. The Plot: 3. Seditious spaces
4. Coming together
Part III. Conspiracy Arrested: 5. The arrests begin
6. In the segredos
Conclusion: writing nation
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]