Enslaved, poor and free and native peoples in the rural history of Mato Grosso: the roots and the antithesis of property by the paths and Quilombos (18th and 19th centuries)

Abstract

For a discussion of the roads and quilombos (villages of fugitive slaves) found in Mato Grosso, in the period between the Colony and the Brazilian Empire, it is necessary to briefly reflect on the issues of the present, involving the poor of the land, to make a foray into rural history of Portuguese America, in order to overcome the tripod consecrated by the traditional historiography as the explanatory of the history of Brazil in its first three centuries: monoculture, slave labor and patroonship. In this debate, we aim to understand the importance of food production for domestic supply and the role of poor, free, enslaved and indigenous farmers in this universe. Starting from the analysis of Official Correspondence of the Province of Mato Grosso, and from sources such as Relatos Monçoeiros, we will work on some signs of the presence of roças (plantations) and roceiros (country bumpkins), in their various categories, with emphasis for some of the routes connecting the north and south of Mato Grosso, especially in the context of the monsoons. The plantations of the poor and free in the trajectory of the monsoons of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the cultivation of the slaves in the northern and southern quilombos of Mato Grosso and the indigenous plantations that supplied the sertanistas (frontiersmen) incursions by the south in the XIX, in the report of Defeats by Joaquim Francisco Lopes, will be themes approached for bringing traces of food production and places in which the farmers, in their diversity, lived and worked.