More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

This chapter probes the mobilization of liberated Africans, convicts, slaves, and vagrants to build the Casa de Correção between 1834 and 1850. Drawing from research on how modernizing political elites developed administrative, technical, and identification technologies to render peripatetic peoples legible for the purpose of taxation and labor control, the chapter investigates how the construction of the Casa de Correção evolved into a project of legibility to regulate the effects of the campaign against human trafficking. Through its punitive and labor discipline roles, the penitentiary evolved into an important site of racialization of the poor along cleavages that assigned differentiated treatment by legal status – slave or free – and ethnic origins – European immigrants, Brazilians, or Africans. The penitentiary reinforced existing divisions in Brazilian society between slaves and free, foreigners and nationals, while blurring the lines of distinctions among these categories through the regime of labor and confinement.

Enlightenment philosophy introduced the notion that social evolution and progress resulted from scientific inquiry and technological advancements. This view evolved out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment idea that all societies progressed in a linear fashion toward modernity, the pinnacle of which was European civilization. In this construction “modern” or “progressive” societies were those that mimicked European cultural, social, economic, and political structures. Western missionaries’ efforts in the nineteenth century to bring “Christianity, commerce and civilization” set in motion a progressive ideology that led to modern development practice in Africa. These three words captured the Enlightenment ideology of social progress, the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, and the mating of Christian doctrine with secular social Darwinian ideas. By defining poverty as a lack of access to capitalist systems “modern” societies defined any cultures not fully participating in capitalism as poor. These concepts are the bedrock of modern development theory. They presume that Western civilization is the highest form of social development, that all societies must progress in a linear fashion to attain this status, and that development will come through an economic transformation that will reshape social and cultural aspects of societies.

Chapter 6 begins with an analysis of the inter-imperial political context within which the abolition of the slave trade was enacted, focusing in particular on the Danish and British edicts outlawing the trade in 1803 and 1807, respectively. It continues with an examination of the practical implementation of the ban and ends with a more detailed treatment of the continuation of the illicit intercolonial trade as carried out within the microregion of the Leeward Islands. The history of the abolition of the slave trade has most often been told from the perspective of imperial legislators and advocates of abolition. When the implementation of the abolition has been treated with serious effort, it has typically been done either through a top-down analysis of diplomacy and international politics or via studies of the places most notably evading the abolition. Employing a microregional perspective and using the Leeward Islands as the historical case reveals a different side of the story of abolition. This analysis largely confirms the hierarchical dimension of the slave trade abolition in an inter-imperial context, but it also illustrates the vast gaps between imperial policy and colonial practice by showcasing the myriad ways in which local actors and networks circumvented official decrees and continued trading in slaves.