Slavery - Volume III - by Laurentino Gomes

From the best-selling author of 1808, 1822 and 1889

On the afternoon that Prince Dom Pedro arrived on the banks of the Ipiranga, on September 7, 1822, Brazil was gorged with slavery. Buying and selling people was the biggest business in the new independent country. Enslaved men and women made up more than a third of the total population, estimated at 4.7 million people. Another third was made up of freed blacks and mestizos of African origin – a poor, illiterate and needy population, dominated by the white minority. The indigenous people, already decimated by wars, diseases and invasion of their territories, did not even appear in the statistics.

The last book in the Slavery trilogy is dedicated to the 19th century; to Independence; to the First and Second Reigns; to the abolitionist movement, which resulted in the Lei Áurea of ​​May 13, 1888; and the legacy of slavery, which still hinders Brazilians' journey towards the future. Slavery was, in the definition of José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, the Patriarch of Independence, "a cancer that contaminated and gnawed at the entrails of Brazilian society". Spread throughout the territory, slavery permeated all activities and all social classes. The largest slave territory in America in 1822, Brazil remained that way until the end of the 19th century, with its routine marked by whips and violence against enslaved men and women.

No other issue is as important and as defining of our national identity as slavery. Knowing it helps explain what we were in the past, what we are today and also what we will be from now on. In an impactful text richly illustrated with images and graphics, Laurentino Gomes launches the third volume of his work, the result of 6 years of research, which included trips to 12 countries and 3 continents.