Licentious Liberty in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais (review)

Licentious Liberty in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais. By KATHLEEN J. HIGGINS. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 1999. Photographs. Graphs. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 236 pp. Cloth, $55.00; Paper, $22.50.

Kathleen Higgins focuses on questions of race, gender, and autonomy in this case study of slavery in the colonial mining community of Sabara. She demonstrates the changing conditions of slavery and how slavery was "gendered" in a society with highly contorted sex ratios for both slave and free populations. Higgins makes a strong case that "one effective way to understand the history of eighteenth-century Sabara may be to consider it in terms of the evolving status, autonomy and influence of non-White women" (p. 5). She argues that the overwhelming view that the "work of miners was defined as the work of men" may have been the "single most important determinant of the evolutionary path of the colonial slave society of Minas Gerais" (p. 13). Higgins describes a society molded by its sex ratio and the particular freedom common in slave societies focused on mining.

According to Higgins, predominantly bachelor slave owners tended to free their own offspring born of slave women, in part because they had no other heirs. The high numbers of slave women manumitted relative to their numbers prior to 1760 is also seen within this context. Higgins emphasizes the results of the race/sex ratios in the prevalence of concubinage at all levels of society, regardless of the views of the church. Higgins does not, however, see manumission of the slave lover as an automatic result of such unions; manumission of the child or children was much more common. The evolution of a prosperous ex-slave and free black population in Sabara is a direct consequence of the race-specific sex ratios, and their relationship to power within Sabara society.

The most important sources for this study were 32 wills for the period 1716-1725 and 96 inventarios (property inventories) from Sabara from 1725 to 1808. Higgins's conclusions concerning total population, slave population, sex ratio, ethnicity, distribution of slaves among the population, and the presence or absence of legitimate (or legally determined) heirs are based on her aggregation of the individual statistics represented in the texts of these wills and property inventories. This strategy was utilized in the absence of actual population counts available before 1776. While the method is ingenious and laborious, and Higgins merits praise for even attempting it, it is somewhat puzzling that she never makes an argument for its relative accuracy.

Certainly not everybody wrote wills--possibly less than half of property holders. Also individuals without so-called "forceable heirs" were considerably more likely to write a will to prevent the state from itself being the heir for all of their property. Those with illegitimate or natural children might also want to recognize those heirs. An inventario was supposed to be done at the death of all those with property. However, the absence of large numbers of inventories indicating no slaves and no personal real estate, which must have been the case of many, suggests that the available inventories could not possibly represent the entire population. Even more important is the undoubted bias of those that exist toward more affluent householders, and toward those without obvious heirs.

Another important primary source was 1,133 manumission records, which allowed the analysis of change over time in manumission patterns, as a prosperous mining economy moved into a period of decline in the 1760s. These provide interesting insights into the social mobility of slave women in colonial Sabara. Adult slave women, frequently manumitted in the first period, were manumitted much less often at the end of the century. However, by...