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The paper examines the life of Antônio Varela, born in 1805, a pardo man whose mother was a freed woman, who became captain of the National Guardo of Brazilian Imperial State, a slave master, and a major landowner in the village of Piranga, a former district of the municipality of Mariana in Minas Gerais. This paper discusses his relationships with family, god parentage, and neighbors in the area where he owned land. In doing so, it highlights the routes of social mobility and economic ascension strategies, and explores the geographically-structured quotidian sociability that circumscribed his life course. This paper presents a cartography of freedom and socioeconomic ascension, emphasizing the new spaces of sociability that enabled Varela to raise his standing in the local hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze the distribution and composition of the enslaved population in one of the most prosperous parishes of Mariana's district during the 18th century: Guarapiranga. To this end, the original "Rol dos que confessaram e comungaram no ano de 1766" is adopted as a source, its numbers being compared with those of the little known Mapa da população da Leal Cidade de Mariana no ano de 1810. The purpose is to understand the distribution of slaved population by household units of the parish over the decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dismissal because of the "color defect" for descendants of enslaved and free Africans became a widespread feature of the licensing process for the secular clergy throughout the eighteenth century. However, the expression was neither natural nor meaningless. The standardization of these dismissals refl1ected vocabulary that was established based on the experiences of ecclesial agents in the context of a slave society permeated by Old Regime political culture. Therefore, the expression came to represent a vision about social classifications based on color and conceptions about slavery-related origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the decrees issued by the Spanish kings and colonial authorities granting freedom to runaway slaves from foreign colonies. The aim is to interpret these laws, comprised of royal cedulas, proclamations, orders, and instructions, which have been registered from 1680 to the late eighteenth century, in the field of international politics and inter-imperial rivalry. I claim that, despite the precedents in Castilian legal tradition dating back to medieval times, this set of legal dispositions was, above all, a diplomatic expedient used by the Spanish Crown as a threat to rival slavery-based Atlantic empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will discuss the conditions for slavery reproduction in Rio de Janeiro's plantations after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. In order to do that, we studied the slavery demography of Commendator Joaquim Breves' plantations, which were a symbol of slavery expansion on the coffee valley. Through one of the plantations' registers, we analyze the demographical development in this complex of farms. We demonstrate that, after the 1860s, a broad vegetative growth in those plantations began to develop through a movement that had different meanings to slaves and their owners. Thus, we will analyze the dimensions of slavery reproduction, and its limits, in the two decades preceding the downfall of slavery in Rio de Janeiro's coffee plantations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]