O império português e as arqueações empregadas no transporte de escravizados: diáspora negra de Angola e Costa da Mina para Pernambuco em meados do século XVIII.

Abstract

This work aims to problematize the narratives about the slave trade, specifically the modes of preparation, transport and accommodation of men, women and children on the vessels that came from Angola and Costa da Mina to the Captaincy of Pernambuco in the mid-eighteenth century. Since the centenary of abolition, in 1988, and with the advent of new epistemologies in the field of history, the debate on the enslavement of men and women of African origin has been gaining momentum, and proving to be necessary in the resumption of stories that summarize the violence suffered by the Africans. human beings in modern slavery. To think about the institution of black enslavement is to reflect on the entire framework that instrumentalized the trade in African men, women and children. One of these instrumentalizations was the efficiency and profitability of this trade for the crown and merchants, which passed through legislation that ordered, firstly, the architecture and structure of vessels; the accommodation of enslaved subjects, the crew; provisions for travel and the crossing of the Atlantic. To this end, the Portuguese Empire in 1684 enacted the Regulation of Tonnage that provided the basis for the legislation on the slave trade. This law regulated the number of enslaved people that could be transported from the tonnage of the vessels. In this way, the law was a legal framework to limit the overcrowding of vessels and consequently the possible deaths of black men and women. From the use of sources made available digitally by the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino Português, we scrutinized the practice in the transport of slaves and the legislation on tonnage. For that, we use the concept of "strategy" and "tactic" postulated by Michel de Certeau (1988), the proposal by Jorge Larrosa (2002) to reflect on the "experience" of the enslaved and also the concept of "subaltern", reflected in the by Agata Bloch (2022). Throughout the research, differences and contradictions were found in the process of implementing Portuguese legislation on tonnage.