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4 - Commodification of Human Beings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2022

Mariana P. Candido
Mariana P. Candido
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
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Summary

This chapter examines the commodification of people during the nineteenth century. The records available in the colonial archive expose the extent of people’s commodification. The brutality of property claims over human beings is unambiguous in inventories, registers, bills of sale, and waybills, paper documents created to deny humanity and protect the interest of owners. These documents continue to reproduce the violence and legal and extra-legal exclusion that enslaved individuals experienced in the past by limiting their historical existence to records that categorized them solely as commodities. The records were created to facilitate control of property, and their survival discloses the commitment to register people’s exclusion and dispossession.

Keywords

Slaverypropertykinshipviolencecolonialismarchiveresistancegender
Type
Chapter
Information
Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola
A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality
 , pp. 138 - 167
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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