Documenting, monetising and taxing Brazilian slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

Although Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas, knowledge of the accounting and taxation of slave-related transactions in Brazil is under-developed. Here we explore Portuguese language documents showing how accounting and taxation were implicated in maintaining slavery in Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We present examples of key documents involving slaves (such as inventory lists, rental agreements, insurance policies, and receipts) and explain how slave-related transactions were recorded and taxed. We enable important comparisons to be drawn with the accounting and taxation of slaves in the USA and British West Indies.[its] population[s] without large and continuous importations of Africans' (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 25-26).Second, slave labor activities in Brazil were more diversified than elsewhere in the Americas. Slavery was a major factor responsible for the success of Brazil's sugar, gold mining, coffee and cotton industries (Baranov 2000, 18-19). When the trade in slaves was abolished in 1850, slavery had spread throughout Brazilian society. Big farmers and rich people were not alone in owning slaves: they were owned too by priests, the military, civil servants and even free slaves themselves. This diffusion and convergence of interests was one of the main reasons why slavery endured for so long in Brazil (Albuquerque and Filho 2006).The long history of slavery in Brazil has produced a genuinely multi-racial society, as evidenced by Brazil's art, architecture, linguistic expression, cuisine, music and popular culture. The diversity of art and samba and the rhythm of the dance of capoeira and carnival is said to give a peculiar spatial dimensionality to the existential reality of Brazilian culture (Sidekum, 2007). Fiorin (2009, 120) states that Brazilians are characterized by 'the mulata [a person of black and white ancestry], who is the most important representative of Brazilian race; and by the tolerance and the good relationship between people of different races.' Similarly, Freyre (2006) believes that the identity of Brazilians was forged by the principle of multi-racial participation.Third, although some scholars have examined accounting for slave plantation workers in the US (Razek 1985;Fleischman, Oldroyd, and Tyson 2004; and in the BWI (Cowton and O'Shaughnessy 1991), knowledge of how accounting and taxation practices were implicated in the operation of slavery in Brazil is under-developed.Fourth, understanding the operation of business in modern Brazil can be enhanced by knowledge of its strong historical links with slavery: 'Brazil has the largest African-descent population in the Americas' (Reis and Klein 2011, 181). At the beginning of the nineteenth

The role of government accounting and taxation in the institutionalization of slavery in Brazil

“…Studies of accounting and slavery in Brazil are scarce. Analyses of 4 Brazilian documents relating to accounting and taxation practices have concluded that such practices were calculative recording and revenue raising mechanisms to facilitate the operation of Brazil's slave-based society (Rodrigues, Craig, Schmidt, & Santos, 2015).…”

“…In cases of non-compliance concerning transactions involving slaves, a monetary fine equal to the market value of the slave was payablehalf to the informant and the other half to the Royal Crown (Berute, 2006;Rodrigues et al, 2015). Accounting devices helped to support slavery-related transactions.…”

“…Although there was widespread misrepresentation of newly imported slaves as acculturated slaves, registration helped tax authorities to collect meia-siza tax on all traded slaves (whether acculturated or not) and permitted slave owners to use slaves as collateral assets to obtain credit (for an example, see Rodrigues et al, 2015) (dissimulation). 16 This notion of 'slaves as collateral' is consistent with a pervading image of 'slaves as property'.…”

“…56). Topik (1991;p.255) reported that plantation owners regarded slaves as property to be used collateral for bank loans and that 'as late as 1888, 61 per cent of [Banco do Brasil's] mortgages were secured by slaves' (see Rodrigues et al, 2015).…”

The farm as an accounting laboratory: an essay on the history of accounting and agriculture

“…Other forms of detailed agricultural accounting could also be found elsewhere in Europe, for instance in some regions of Spain, where seed banks known as "pósitos", regulated by the royal administration from the sixteenth century, issued loans to farmers and kept precise records of the ensuing credit relationships (Prado-Lorenzo, García-Salinero and González-Bravo 2017). Colonial plantations were another institutional setting that shaped the development of detailed forms of agricultural accounting, in particular for the valuation and oppression of slave populations treated as livestock (Barney 1994;Fleischman and Tyson 2004;Tyson 2004, 2011;Oldroyd, Fleischman and Tyson 2008;Rodrigues et al 2015;Rosenthal 2013aRosenthal , 2013bRosenthal , 2016Oldroyd 2004, 2005).…”