Policing Freedom - Illegal Enslavement, Labor, Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Brazil

Policing Freedom uses the case study of Brazil's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção, to explore how the Brazilian government used incarceration and enforced labor to control the prison population during the foundational period of Brazilian state formation and postcolonial nation building. Placing this penitentiary within the global debates about the disciplinary benefits of confinement and the evolution of free labor ideology, Martine Jean illustrates how Brazil's political elites envisioned the penitentiary as a way to discipline the free working class. While participating in the debates about the inhumanity of the slave trade, philanthropists and lawmakers, both conservative and liberal, articulated a nation-building discourse that focused on reforming Brazil's vagrants into workers in anticipation of slavery's eventual demise, laying the racialized foundations for policing and incarceration in the post-emancipation period.

List of contents

Introduction. The rogues' gallery; 1. The politics of slavery, race, nation, and prison building; 2. Confinement, labor, and citizenship; 3. Prison labor and the politics of slavery; 4. Disciplining children and engendering racialized citizenship; 5. Adelino Mwissicongo and the afterlife of emancipation; Conclusion. Slavery's punitive afterlife; Appendix.

About the author

Martine Jean is an independent scholar and historian of nineteenth-century Brazil, slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship in the Atlantic World. Her work has been published in many journals including Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, The Journal of Social History and Slavery and Abolition. This is her first book.

Product details

• Authors: Martine Jean
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.10.2025
• EAN: 9781009289153
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0928915-3
• No. of pages: 366
• Series: Afro-Latin America
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; HISTORY / Latin America / General, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Politics and government, Latin America – Mexico, Central America, South America, History of the Americas, Penology and punishment, Political control and freedoms, Sociology: work and labour, Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery