Brazilian slavery served display and vanity far beyond material production

Evidence

Now the slave was more than an object of luxury, as Lacerda had believed. The slave in nineteenth-century Brazil had become a costume, an item of social dress and self-presentation as well as the source of the energy that produced the real wealth of the economy. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 744

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Echoes the chapter’s earlier theme of slaveholding as social performance of mastery, connecting to the reader’s interest in how slave societies constructed identity.

Related

• Brazilian slaves functioned as social dress as well as labor (similarity 0.93)
• Brazilian slaves functioned as the master class’s costume and dress (similarity 0.92)
• Brazilian slavery extended to white enslaved people, disproving race-based definitions (similarity 0.82)
• Slave status marked whites so indelibly that even race could not absorb the stigma (similarity 0.81)
• Brazilian slave-trade nationalization reorganized ethnic slave disposition patterns (similarity 0.81)
• Slave traders assigned Africans stereotyped aptitudes to match labor niches. (similarity 0.80)
• Slavery in Brazil extended even to whites (similarity 0.80)
• Post-slavery Brazil retained a white aristocratic caste dependent on Black labor (similarity 0.79)
• Slave-produced wealth funded the mother countries’ entire development (similarity 0.79)
• Severe sex imbalance and infant mortality drove Brazil’s slave decline (similarity 0.79)
• Southern slavery was a culture and social order, not only an economic system (similarity 0.79)
• Post-slavery capitalism extended domination to tropical labor. (similarity 0.78)