Combining modern scholarship with a wealth of documentary and archival evidence, this is an authoritative portrait of the lives of slaves and free persons of colour in colonial Brazil. The author charts the working conditions, domestic lives, preoccupations and aspirations of slaves and their fellow freed men. In a work which underlines the validity and importance of minority histories, he argues that the slaves and freedmen of colonial Brazil maintained and preserved their own cultural identity, taking decisions independently of the white ruling class. The result is not a history of extremes...