SLAVE TRADE, POPULATION AND ECONOMY IN MARANHÃO DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Abstract

From the first decade of the Brazilian Empire, the stagnation of exports and the sharp retraction of the Atlantic traffic produced great changes in the population dynamics of the enslaved people in the province of Maranhão. We aim to analyze these changes through the demographic profile of slaves, mainly Africans, in five villages in the interior of the province in the first half of the 19th century. The 1848 slave census provided individualized data by captive (micro data), making it possible to distinguish those originating in Africa from “nationals”. Based mainly on this source and in comparisons with others already available, we analyze the demographic and economic changes in Maranhão. When analyzing the proportion of Africans in the total number of captives according to age in 1848, we noticed an increasing participation of them as the age increased, revealing decreasing immigration movements in the first half of the 19th century.