Revisiting the Casa-grande: Plantation and cane-farming households in early nineteenth-century Bahia

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 84, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 619-659

  Barickman, B J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 29344462961     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-84-4-619     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. John Manuel Monteiro, review of Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822, by Alida C. Metcalf, Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 1 (1994): 150
2. Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime de economia patriarcal, 43rd ed. (1933; Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2001)
3. Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos: Decadência do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento do urbano, 12th ed. (1936; Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000)
4. See, e.g., José Geraldo Vinci de Moraes and José Marcio Rego, Conversas com historiadores brasileiros (São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2002), 193, 346, 322-23, 380
5. Joaquim Falcão and Rosa Maria Barboza de Araújo, eds., O miperador das idéias: Gilberto Freyre em questão (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2002)
6. and Manolo Florentino, "O DNA brasileiro," Jornal do Brasil, http://jbonline.terra.com.br/ (accessed 16 Feb. 2002)
7. On Freyre, see, e.g., Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo, Guerra e paz: "Casa-grande & senzala" e a obra de Gilberto Freyre nos anos 30 (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1994)
8. Jeffrey D. Needell, "Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre," American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (1995): 51-77
9. and Thomas E. Skidmore, "Raízes de Gilberto Freyre," Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 1-20
10. For direct quotations, I have relied on the English translation: Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1956), xliii
11. See Freyre, Casa-grande, 56, for the original passage
12. Also note that Freyre may be responsible for the now widespread use of casa-grande to designate the planter's residence in the historiography; as Sheila de Castro Faria points out, the expression does not appear in colonial sources; "Casa-grande," in Dicionário do Brasil colonial (1500-1808), ed. Ronaldo Vainfas (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2000)
13. Antônio Cándido [de Mello e Souza], "The Brazilian Family," in Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent, ed. T. Lynn Smith and Alexander Marchant (New York: Dryden Press, 1951), 291-312
14. Samara, As mulheres, o poder e a família: São Paulo, século XIX (São Paulo: Marco Zero, 1989), 15-19
15. José Luiz de Freitas, "O mito da família extensa: Domicílio c estrutura fundiária em Jundìaí (1818)," in Brasil: História econômica e demogrâfica, ed. Iraci del Nero da Costa (São Paulo: IPE-USP, 1986), 205, 219
16. Ronaldo Vainfas, Trópico dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e Inquisição no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1989), 107-13
17. Mariza Corrêa, "Repensando a família patriarcal brasileira," in Colcha de retalbos: Estudos sobre a família no Brasil, ed. Antonio Augusto Arantes et al., 3rd ed. (Campinas: Ed. da UNICAMP, 1994), 17-19
18. Sheila de Castro Faria, "Histôria da família e demografia historica," in Domínios da história: Fnsaios de teoria e metodologia, ed. Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Ronaldo Vainfas (Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1997), 252
19. and José Flávio Motta, "The Historical Demography of Brazil at the V Centenary of Its Discovery," Ciência e Cultura 51, nos. 5-6 (1999): 447
20. Also see Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 19-20, 215. Note that by no means do all the authors listed here endorse the traditional interpretation
21. and Caio Prado Júnior, Formaçâo do Brasil contemporâneo: Colônia, 20th ed. (1942; São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987), 289-93. But, perhaps because of their status within Brazilian academia, the latter two authors are seldom mentioned as sources of the traditional view
22. For a useful introduction to these authors (as well as Freyre), see Dain Borges, "Brazilian Social Thought in the 1930s," Luso-Brazilian Review 31, no. 2 (1994): 137-50
23. On the more recent research and for references to many of the relevant works, see, e.g., Motta, "The Historical Demography," 448-50, 454-56
24. Faria, "História," 252-58
25. Samara, A família
26. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Sexuality, Gender, and the Family in Colonial Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 1 (1993): 120-21
27. Donald Ramos, "From Minho to Minas: The Portuguese Roots of the Mineiro Family," Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 4 (1993): 1, 1n1
28. Luiz R. B. Mott, Piauí colonial: População, economia e sociedade (Teresina: Projeto Petrônio Portella, 1985)
29. Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987)
30. Anna Amélia Vieira Nascimento, Dez freguesias da cidade do Salvador: Aspectos sociais e urbanos do século XIX (Salvador: Fundação Cultural do Estado da Bahia, 1986)
31. Katia de Queirós Mattoso, Família e sociedade na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988)
32. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O nome e o sangue: Uma fraude genealógica no Pernambuco colonial (São Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 1989)
33. Mello, "O fim das casas-grandes," in História da vida privada no Brasil, ed. Fernando A. Novais, 4 vols. (São Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 1997-98), 2:385-437
34. Dain Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992)
35. Mary Ann Mahony, "The World Cacao Made: Society, Politics, and History in Southern Bahia, Brazil, 1820-1919" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1996)
36. Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, A história da família no Brasil colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1998)
37. James Wadsworth, "Agents of Orthodoxy: Inquisitional Power and Prestige in Colonial Pernambuco (Brazil)" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Arizona, 2002)
38. Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, O feudo: A. Casa da Torre da conquista dos sertões à independência do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002)
39. and Marha S. Santos, "'Sertões temerosos (Menacing Backlands)': Honor, Gender, and Violence in a Changing World, Cearä, Brazil, 1845-1889" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Arizona, 2004)
40. Peter L. Eisenberg, Os homens esquecidos: Escravos e trabalhadores livres, Brasil, séculos XVIII e XLX (Campinas: Ed. da UNICAMP, 1989)
41. and Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750-1850 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003). But São Paulo became a significant producer of sugar only from the 1780s onward, and Paulista plantations tended to be much smaller than those in the main Northeastern sugar districts at the time. Moreover, Paulista plantations (unlike those in coastal Bahia and Pernambuco) produced not only sugar, but also surpluses of foodstuffs (maize, rice, beans, etc.)
42. Nancy J. Naro, A Slave's Place, a Master's World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil (London: Continuum, 2000)
43. and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)
44. Also see José Flávio Motta, Corpos escravos, vontades livres: Posse de escravos e família escra em Bananal (1801-1829) (São Paulo: Annablume, 1999)
45. and Renato Leite Marcondes, A arte de acumular na economia cafeeira: Vale do Parába, século XIX (Lorena: Stiliano, 1998)
46. On this point, see Faria, A Colônia, 47-52
47. But see Iraci del Nero da Costa, "Revisitando o domicílio complexo," Estudos Econômicos 21, no. 3 (1991): 401-7; and n. 53 below. Needless to say, because their arguments did not rely on quantification and for other important reasons, neither Freyre nor Antonio Cândido took up this issue
48. I discuss the attempted 1835 population count in "Reading the 1835 Censuses from Bahia: Citizenship, Kinship, Household, and Slavery in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil," The Americas 59, no. 3 (2003): 287-323. Linking the census with baptismal and marriage registries would, of course, complement the analysis presented here. But inquiries in 1992 and 1994 at the Arquivo da Cúria in Salvador revealed that Iguape's parish records had become too fragile to be consulted. Also note that revisionist authors who work with household lists from Southeastern Brazil do not rely on linking those lists with parish registries in developing their arguments
49. On the Recôncavo and the Bahian sugar industry, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations
50. and B. J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780-1860 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998)
51. See, e.g., Luís dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no século XVIII [c. 1799], annot. Braz do Amaral, presentation by Edison Carneiro, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (first published as Recopilação de noticias soteropolitanas . . ., 1921) (Salvador: Itapuã, 1969), 1:231-32, 2:483-84
52. José da Silva Lisboa, "Descripção da cultura da Bahia" (1799), Anais da Biblioteca National 36 (1914): 123
53. José Joaquim de Almeida e Arnizáu, "Memoria topographica, historica, commercial e politica da Villa da Cachoeira . . ." [1825], Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 25 (1862): 133-34
54. Domingos José Antonio Rebello, "Corograpliia ... do Imperio do Brasil" (1829), Revista do Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia 55 (1929): 171
55. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 119-25, 146-47
56. See Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 116-18
57. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 446, 450
58. Eisenberg, Os homens, 362
59. Also see Luna and Klein, Slavery, 36, 39, 45
60. See, e.g., B.J. Barickman, "As cores do escravismo: Escravistas 'pretos,' 'pardos' e 'cabras' no Recôncavo baiano, 1835," População e Família 2 (1999): 7-59
61. See, e.g., Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview, 1986), 158-63
62. Donald Ramos, "Single and Married Women in Vila Rica, Brazil, 1754-1838," Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991): 261-82
63. Avelino Jesus da Costa, "População da Cidade da Baía em 1775," in Actas do V Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasilieros (Coimbra: [Gráfica de Coimbra], 1964), 246
64. Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo no século XIX: Ana Gertrudis de Jesus (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984), 10-43
65. Maria Luiza Marcílio, Caiçara: Terra e populaç ão: Estudo de demografia histórica e da história social de Ubatuba (São Paulo: Paulinas, 1986), 132-33
66. Samara, As mulheres, 37
67. Metcalf, Family, 145
68. B. J. Barickman and Martha Few, "Ana Paulinha de Queirós, Joaquina da Costa, and Their Neighbors: Free Women of Color as Household Heads in Rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835," in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Caspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, forthcoming)
69. Donald Ramos, "City and Country: The Family in Minas Gerais, 1804-1838," Journal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978): 365
70. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Household Composition and Headship as Related to Changes in the Mode of Production: São Paulo, 1765 to 1836," Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 1 (1980): 88. Other studies also indicate averages of roughly 4-5 free members per household for various districts in Southeastern Brazil
71. See, e.g., Marcílio, Caiçara, 131, 223
72. Marcílio, Crescimento, 97
73. Clotilde Andrade Paiva and Herbert S. Klein, "Slave and Free in Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais," Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 1 (1994): 6
74. Metcalf, Family, 147 (for nonslaveholding rural households)
75. Luna and Klein, Slavery, 70, 90, 94
76. Studies of domestic agregados are scant, but see, e.g., Eni de Mesquita Samara, "Os agregados: Uma tipologia do fim do período colonial," Estudos Econômicos 11, no. 3 (1981): 159-68
77. and Kuznesof, Household Economy, 156-61
78. Such relationships have perhaps been most extensively documented for colonial Minas Gerais. See, e.g., Eduardo França Paiva, Escravos e libertós nos Minas Geras do século XVIII: Estratégias de resistência através dos testamentos (São Paulo: Annablume, 1995)
79. Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes: O outro lado do mito (São Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 2003)
80. and Kathleen J. Higgins, "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sahará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999)
81. See, e.g., Ramos, "City and Country" 366
82. Marcílio, Crescimento, 61-65, 96-103
83. Marcílio, Caiçara, 131-33
84. Motta, Corpos escravos, 396-99
85. Mott, Piauí, 83-86
86. See Motta, "The Historical Demography," 448. Also note that, within Laslett's scheme (introduction, 28-29, 34-35), presence of servants, lodgers, etc., does not affect the classification of a household by its core structure. Yet, because the presence of free retainers and other free nonkin dependents is important in evaluating the traditional view of the plantation household, table 4 and the following discussion take into account their presence (or absence). For the moment, I also exclude slaves, which matches the procedures used by other scholars who work with Brazilian censuses
87. On Laslett's scheme and his approach to family history, however, see, e.g., Lutz K. Berkner, "The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structure," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 4 (1975): 721-28
88. Steven Ruggles, "The Transformation of the American Family Structure," American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (1994): 103-28
89. and Hermann Rebel, "Dispossession in the Communal Memory: An Alternative Narrative about Austria's Descent into the Holocaust," Focaal 26-27 (1996): 170. Also see n. 53 below
90. Ramos, "City and Country," 366. In one rural district studied by Ramos (Cachoeira), 22% of all households had solitary heads in 1801, but by 1831 that proportion had fallen to 14%
91. João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A. história do levante dos malês em 1835, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 2003), esp. 110-11. Also note that, according to the census, the planters' families were not living in the village of Santiago do Iguape
92. Marcílio, Caiçara, 105, 132-33
93. Costa, "Revisitando"
94. and Barickman and Few, "Ana Paulinha."
95. See Lewin, Politics, 130
96. and Borges, The Family, 73 (who cite the same proverb in different, but related, contexts)
97. Samara, As mulberes, 169. In 1835, the other 929 households in Iguape had, on average, only 3.5 free members
98. Ramos, "City and Country," 364
99. and Esterzilda Berenstein de Azevedo, Arquitetura do açú car: Engenhos do Recôncavo baiano no período colonial (São Paulo: Nobel, 1990), 155-61
100. and, more generally, Robert W. Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor: Esperanças e recordaçôes na formação da família escrava - Brasil Sudeste, século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999), 149-208
101. Antonio de Moraes e Silva, Diccionario da lingua portugueza . . ., 3rd ed. (1789; Lisbon: Typ. de M.P. de Lacerda, 1823), s.vv. familia, fogo, and pai
102. Raphael Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, e latino . . . (Coimbra: Collcgio das artes da Companhia de Jesu [sic] / Lisbon: Officina de P. da Sylva, 1712-21), s.vv. familia, fogo, and pai
103. Antônio Houaiss et al., Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2001 ), s.vv. pai and páter- famílias
104. Also see, e.g., Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, preface to Thomas Davatz, Memórias de um colono no Brasil, trans, and annot. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1850; São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1941), 26-27
105. Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 20
106. David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 2-3. In "Reading," I discuss in greater detail the definition of the fogo used in the 1835 Bahian censuses. Note that U.S. censuses also enumerated slaves as members of their owners' households
107. Margo Anderson, "The History of Women and the History of Statistics," Journal of Women's History 4, no. 1 (1992): 17-20
108. See also Freyre, Casa-grande, 46, 49
109. Vainfas, Trópico, 110
110. Also see Angela Mendes de Almeida, "Notas sobre a família no Brasil," in Pensando a família no Brasil: Da colânia à modernidade, ed. Angela Mendes de Almeida (Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo, 1987), 53-66
111. and Santos, "'Sertões temerosos,'" chap. 4
112. On the tendency to equate the extended family with the patriarchal family, see Mello, "O fim," 412-13
113. See Araújo, Guerra e paz, on imprecision and ambiguity as recurring features of Freyre's mode of analysis
114. On Freyre's chronological vagueness in a different context, see Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Liberdade: Rotinas e rupturas do escravismo no Recife, 1822-1850 (Recife: Ed. Universitária da UFPE, 1998), 26
115. Borges, The Family, 4
116. Also see, e.g., Freyre, Sobrados, 402
117. Faria, A colónia, 41-43
118. Graham, Patronage
119. Wadsworth, "Agents"
120. Faria, A colônia
121. Joseph L. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1980), 155, 337-38
122. Darrell E. Levi, The Prados of São Paulo: An Elite Family and Social Change, 1840-1930 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987)
123. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "A família na sociedade brasileira: Parentesco, clientelismo e estrutura social (São Paulo, 1700-1980)," Revista Brasileira de História 9, no. 17 (1988-89): 37-63
124. and Zephyr Frank, "Elite Families and Oligarchic Politics on the Brazilian Frontier: Mato Grosso, 1882-1937," Latin American Research Review 36, no. 1 (2001): 49-74
125. Lucila Hermann, "Evolução da estrutura social de Guaratinguetá çum período de trezentos anos," Revista de Admmistracão 2, nos. 5-6, facs. repr. (1948; São Paulo: IPE-USP, 1986)
126. Apparently the first scholar to call attention to the censuses in Paulista archives was Samuel Harman Lowrie, "Bibliographical Sources Concerning Population Statistics in the State of São Paulo, Brazil," Handbook of Latin American Studies (1937): 490-501
127. On this matter, also see Vainfas, Trópica, 110
128. Also see Vainfas, Tropíco, 110
129. and Samara, Mulheres, 15-22
130. As in Pernambuco, chapels could be found on larger engenhos in the Recôncavo. See Azevedo, Arquitetura, 125-26, 169-70. Some wealthier Bahian planters did maintain resident chaplains on their estates in the colonial period, but many did not
131. Likewise, a 1762 census of Oeiras in the backlands of Piauí, discovered in a Portuguese archive, has been recently transcribed and published, with an introduction, by Miridan Britto Falci in "A cidade de Oeiras do Piauí," Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geografico Brasileira 407 (2000): 251-99
132. Faria, A colônia, esp. 40-45, 355-93
133. See, e.g., Anna Ribeiro de Goes Bittencourt, Longos serões do campo, ed. and annot. Maria Clara Mariani Bittencourt, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992), 2:38-46
134. Julius Naeher, Land und Leute in der brasilianischen provinz Bahia (Leipzig: Verlag von Gustav Weigel, 1881), 130, 157
135. Also see Pinho, História, 433-34