Soberania e Escravidão

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between slavery and sovereignty in American history. The concept of dominium, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had an ambivalent meaning, ranging from the concepts of private property and political power, which defined the paradox of the relationship between the Crown and the colonial agents mediated by tutelage and slavery of Indians and Africans. What were the limits set by seigniorial and private dominium to the emergence of sovereignty? We will review this issue at four moments of American history: the Habsburg policy overseas to Brazil and Angola, in the period of 1580 and 1640; the British and French colonization of the Antilles, in the second half of the seventeenth century; the reformist politics of the mid-eighteenth century; and the processes of independence of Cuba, Brazil and the United States.