The Enslaved Child in Western São Paulo, Brazil: Role and Representation in the Domestic Slave Trade, 1861–1869

We aim to foreground the importance of enslaved children within the context of the coffee expansion in São Paulo. To this end, in addition to engaging with relevant scholarly literature on the subject, we work with a broad base of primary data drawn from handwritten bills of sale of enslaved individuals. These documents were collected in the municipality of Rio Claro (Province of São Paulo, Brazil) and cover the period between 1861 and 1869. Based on the consulted bibliography and compiled data, we seek to highlight both the significance of enslaved children and the social, economic, and demographic elements related to the dynamics of the domestic slave trade involving this group, such as the volume of sales; the interaction between price and variables like sex, age, type of domestic trade (local, intraprovincial, and interprovincial), and occupation/experience; the number of children sold individually or as part of groups; and the participation of enslaved families in the transactions analyzed.