The Great Fear of 1852: Riots against Enslavement in the Brazilian Empire

Recent studies on the history of slavery have often started off from the concept of Second Slavery, that is, the transformation of Atlantic slavery as part of the expansion of capitalism during the first decades of the nineteenth century, which resulted in “the opening of new zones of slave commodity production—most prominently the U.S. cotton zone, the Cuban sugar zone, and the Brazilian coffee zone—and the decline of older zones of slave production” (French and British Caribbean).¹ There are several merits to the concept of Second Slavery, but I mention just two of them that are of special