The objective of this dissertation consists in the analysis of some aspects of black slavery in the city of Belem, between 1871 (year of the promulgation of the Law of the Free Womb) and may 1888 (when slavery was abolished). The focus of the research is directed to the “human experience” and the “everyday life” of a population that, despite being significant (at least until the middle of the 1880 decade), does not usually appear in the historiography about Belem in the late 19th century, commonly called Belem of the BelleÉpoque. Component elements of this context, as the boom of the rubber economy, the propagation of the ideas of “civilization”, “modernity” and “progress”, and the growth of the free population, end up leaving no space to the slaves that resided and/or roaming around the city and nuanced its landscape. The criminal process in which was the defendant one of this urban slaves, Camilo João Amancio, will be the conducting wire of the four chapters of this dissertation, that address the following problems: the relation of slaves with the police and justice; their insertion in the world of labor and in the urban market of slaves; the uses and meanings of non-work time that they disposed; and the networks of sociability that they wove with the most diverse individuals.
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