Terras, Escravos e Homens Livres: Fazendas em torno da Vila Cajazeiras.

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to show a little more of the history of the city of Cajazeiras in the years "Eighth", when it was still a Village, and was completely involved in a rural world. I tried to show important factors of the economy of the city, through information recorded in the inventories of the residents and in the record of commercial transactions, carried out, not only in the Village, but in the whole universe around them.

The first chapter of this research presents the main paradigms that marked the historiography in the last twenty years. From the theoretical matrices, we had the opportunity to position ourselves on the theoretical-methodological framework that was applied in this historical research. We then choose micro-history and its references, also dialoguing with the elements of the new economic history. In the second chapter, we bring a search path, in Brazilian historiography, about the explanatory roots of the theme. We find in Caio Prado Junior, Celso Furtado, Gilberto Freire and others, classic explanations to think about our object. These recurrences were necessary in authors who thought the themes of the land, economic relations, occupation of the territory and the formation of the rural patriarchy. It seems to us that, originally, our research resides there.

In the third chapter, we arrive at what is specific to the investigation. Opening the windows of history, we find a rural world and its socioeconomic composition. In a detailed way we bring to the reader our reality. We found masters, slaves, free men, daily rhythms and structural features of a rural society that was built around the village of Cajazeiras. Our writing presents the slave market, families favored with buying and selling relations, the constitution of wealth in the rural world, the administration of inheritance and the social relations among the actors of history in this contemporaneity. In the fourth and last chapter we investigated the following problem: "To what extent did the farms existing around the village of Cajazeiras assert themselves as" persistence "at a time when urban areas began to undergo historical modifications and material improvements? To conclude, we will say that our empirical research was carried out in the Second Ferreira Junior Forum and in the Antonio Holanda Real Estate Registry, where we compiled several inventories and records of purchase and sale, real estate and moving assets.