Layers, flows and intersections: Jeronymo José de Mello and artisan life in Rio de Janeiro, 1840s-1880s

Journal of Social History

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 307-328

  Frank, Zephyr ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38849189377     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2008.0039     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Some readers of this essay have suggested that perhaps Jeronymo was a gypsy, as many tinkers were in Europe at the time. Although this is a fascinating idea, there are no documented reasons to believe that the tinkers of Rio de Janeiro were gypsies.
2. The 1849 census counted 205,000 inhabitants, including 78,855 slaves, Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton, 1987), p. 66. By 1890, the census counted 522,651 residents, 124,352 of whom were foreigners, Brazil, IBGE.
3. For the importance of restricting entry and owning one's tools in the British and American cases, see Hobsbawm "Artisan or Labor Aristocrat," Economic History Review 37:3 (August 1984): pp. 355-72,
4. and Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers (New York, 1989). In Rio de Janeiro, Batalha found a case in which the hatters agitated against imports, (1876 pamphlet),
5. Claudio Batalha, "Working-Class Societies in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro," paper presented at the American Historical Association annual meeting, 1998, p. 6. For a discussion of the complex "protectionist" stance sometimes taken by artisans in the case of mid-nineteenth-century Lima, Peru,
6. see Paul Gootenberg, "The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima,"Journal of Latin American Studies, 14:2 (November 1982): pp. 329-358. It is worth noting as well that the debasement of skill occasioned by industrial capitalism and its new division of labor was not uniform. For a good description of why this was the case,
7. see Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, p. 22.
8. Eric Hobsbawm captures this ambivalent position vis-à-vis industrial capitalism in the admittedly special case of Britain in the nineteenth century in "Artisan or Labor Aristocrat?". The importance of distinguishing the fate of the masters, which was often marked by prosperity, versus their journeymen is noted in Charles Steffen's, "Changes in the Organization of Artisan Production in Baltimore, 1790-1820," The William and Mary Quarterly 36:1 (January 1979): pp. 101-117.
9. The classic study of social mobility, in the American context, remains Stephen Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in an American City (Cambridge, MA, 1964). A good overview of the social conditions of artisans in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during a slightly earlier period than the present study of Rio can be found in Lyman Johnson, "The Entrepreneurial Reorganization of an Artisan Trade: The Bakers of Buenos Aires, 1770-1820," The Americas 37:2 (Oct. 1980): pp. 139-160,
10. and, by the same author, "The Silversmiths of Buenos Aires: A Case Study in the Failure of Corporate Social Organization," Journal of Latin American Studies 8:2 (1976): pp. 181-213. For a useful overview of working class history in Brazil, with substantial information on artisans, see June E. Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870-1920 (Albuquerque, 1986).
11. Layers are the disaggregated attributes of geographically and temporally specific spaces.
12. My conception of flow draws inspiration from both structuration theory (Giddens) and time-geography (Hagerstrand and Pred). In addition to this, it can be extended to embrace the dynamics of change over time in the configuration of layers. For the origins of time-geography, see Torsten Hagerstrand, Innovation and Diffusion as a Spatial Process (Chicago, 1967 [originally published in Sweden, 1953]).
13. These ideas are elaborated in Allan Pred, "Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74:2 (1984): pp. 279-297. For the role of time-space in Giddens' theory of structuration, see The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, 1984).
14. For the concept of einbeddedness in terms of economic sociology, see Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddeness," The American Journal of Sociology 91:3 (Nov., 1985): pp. 481-510.
15. Although Granovetter's intervention is meant to be an improvement on the rational actor model in economic theory, the concept of embeddeness is clearly applicable to many other dimensions of social action. For a beautiful example of how family, neighborhood, and social networks of "embedded" individuals can be explicated along these lines, see John Padgett and Christopher Anscll, "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434," American Journal of Sociology 98:6 (1993): pp. 1259-1519.
16. Douglas Rae: City: Urbanism and its End. p. 43. Throughout this paper, addresses of tinkers and other artisans were obtained from the Riode Janeiro City Directory (Almanak Laemmert).
17. For the financial system, sec Maria Bárbara Levy, História da bolsa de valores do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1977);
18. an overview of the economic development of the city and the rise of industry in particular is provided in Eulalia Maria Lahmcyer Lobo's two volume História do Rio de Janeiro: do capital commercial ao capital industrial e financeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1978);
19. the effect of the commercial code and the evolution of the export economy is ably traced our in Richard Graham's Great Britain and the onset of modernization in Brazil, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1968); corporate institutions and growth are examined in detail in Aldo Musacchio, "Law and Finance in Historical Perspective: Politics, Bankruptcy Law, and Corporate Governance in Brazil, 1850-2002," Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 2005; for the rise of modern banking in the last yeats of the nineteenth century see Gail Triner, Banking and economic development: Brazil, 1889-1930 (Basingstoke, 2001). The development of cottage industry and the ebb and flow of artisan production in the important case of Minas Gerais, Brazil's most populous province during the nineteenth century, is analyzed in detail in Douglas Libby, Transformação e trabalho em uma economia escravista: Minas Gerais no sáculo XIX (São Paulo, 1988).
20. For the classic study of the end of the Atlantic slave trade, sec Leslie Bethell, The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade; Britain, Brazil, and the slave trade question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge, 1970).
21. The best explanation of the genesis of the Rio Branco law and its limited effects is found in Needell, The Party of Order: Society, State, and Slavery in the Conservative's Struggle for the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford, 2006).
22. Almanak Laemmert, 1858, p. 696. Note that street numbers tended to change over time. Thus, what was once number 115 became, by the late 1880s, number 103. These changes are codified for the 1870s, inj. Cruvello Cavalcant, Nova Numera Cão dos Prédios da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, (Rio de Janeiro, 1878).
23. For a discussion of estate inventories, their use, and their limitations in interpreting social structure, see Frank, "Wealth Holding in Southeastern Brazil, 1815-1860," Hispanic American Historical Review 85:2 (May 2005): pp. 223-258. For a detailed analysis of the legal regime governing inheritance in nineteenth-century Brazil,
24. see Linda Lewin, "Natural and Spurious Children in Brazilian Inheritance Law from Colony to Empire: A Methodological Essay," The Americas 48:3 (Jan. 1992): pp. 351-96. Real property accounted for 43 percent of the value of estates in the period 1850-1860 and 29 percent in the petiod 1885-1895. Over the same period, slave holdings declined from roughly 15 percent of the value of estates to less than 1 percent in the late 1880s. On the whole, the shift in the allocation of decedents' assets was about equal from slaves and houses to stocks, bonds, and other business investments. Source: inventários, AN; 1850-60 = 363 observations; 1885-95 = 363 observations.
25. I have been fortunate to count on the cooperation of the archivists in Rio de Janeiro's city archive. The urban property tax books, from which this analysis derives, are not generally available to the public and we have been allowed access only to those books related to the three sample years defined in this study.
26. Décima Urbana, 1870 and 1888. In 1888, just 56 individuals or institutions owned more real property in the central parishes than Antonio Galindo. The median yearly rental income for all property owners that same year was 1,200 mil-réis.
27. The business is listed as Macedo & Filhos in the 1889 Almanak Laemmert. Both sons are listed after their father in the section of the directory entitled funileiros, latoeiros, picheleiros, bombeiros hydraulicos e fundidores de torneiras, p. 718.
28. Almanak Laemmert, 1889.
29. For an extended example, see Frank, Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in NineteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque, 2004).
30. The rate of property ownership among artisans was about one-in-five. Slaveholding was more common than ownership of real property. See Frank, Dutra's World.
31. Casa de Detenção, cadastro nominal, livro 5454, AJRJ. Many thanks to Sidney Chalhoub and the other members of the Cecult group at Campinas for making this data available to me.
32. The source of the examples is my inventário sample. A detailed discussion of these documents is found in the data appendix to Dutra's World. For further analysis of the distinction between slave and free labor among artisans in a related context in Buenos Aires,
33. see Lyman L. Johnson, "The Competition of Slave and Free Labor in Artisanal Production, 1770-1815," International Review of Social History, 40: 3 (1995): pp. 409-424.
34. This is, admittedly, a roundabout way of measuring artisans' participation in slaveholding. Only attisans who sent their slaves to jail (or whose slaves were otherwise incarcerated) appear in this source. Nevertheless, as a tough indicator of the ratio of artisans to all other owners matched to this source, the following can be said: of the subgroup of individuals matched in the Almanak and ptison records, artisans owned just over 25 percent of the individually named slaves. The precise incidence of slave ownership among artisans and its relation to broader patterns remains unknown. Again, I am grateful to Sidney Chalhoub and the Cecult team for sharing this dataset with me.
35. Instrucção Pública, Mapa das Escolas, Mapa do Ensino Público, 1874 (Prof. Azambuja Neves), Escola Feminina, Candelaria, AGCRJ.
36. Décima Urbana, 1870, AGCRJ; and, for the partnership, Pereira & Araújo, Junta Comercial, livro 640, 1870, AN.
37. Contrato, Mello & Silva, Junta Comercial, Livro 199, 1887, AN.
38. Corrttato, Mello & Silva, 1887, AN, Décima Urbana, 1888, AGCRJ.
39. For instance, amanuenses in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs earned a base salary of 1:500$ per annum in 1887, with an additional bonus of 500$. Brazil, Minstério das Relações Exteriores, Relatorio do anno de 1887 (Rio de Janeiro, 1888): p. A-N2-81.
40. Wages at the bottom of the scale are well represented by the pay of tegular policemen in the city of Rio de Janeiro, who could expect to earn 1$900 per day, perhaps summing to 570$ per annum if working 300 days. Brazil, Ministétio da Justiça, Relatorio do anno 1886 (Rio de Janeiro, 1887), p. 182. Unskilled manual laborers earned even less than this.
41. Fot a discussion of the event, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, "The Vintem Riot and Political Culture: Rio de Janeiro, 1880," The Hispanic American Historical Review, 60:3 (August, 1980): pp. 431-449. For a good overview of working-class street culture, sec Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: o cotidiano dos Trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (Sao Paulo: 1986).
42. Décima Urbana, 1849, AGCRJ.
43. Décima Urbana, 1870, AGCRJ.
44. Décima Urbana, 1888, AGCRJ.