Manumission in Rio de Janeiro, 1749-54: An African Perspective

This article follows in the footsteps of a long series of manumission studies that have been conducted on slave societies in the Americas. While these studies have illuminated our understanding of who was manumitted, they have only been able to reveal the broadest contours of who was not manumitted. We know that young African men were the least likely to be manumitted, but even among this group, what was the likelihood that slaves from certain African regions were privileged over Africans from other regions in manumission decisions? Using demographic sources, in conjunction with manumission records, the author shows that despite the predominance of Central African men in the slave population of eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Central African men had almost no chance of being manumitted.