Ana de são josé da trindade took out a license in 1807 for herself and three of her slaves to sell foodstuffs door-to-door in Salvador or to set up a stall at a corner or square. She died in 1823, and when her will was opened, readers discovered many things that may not have surprised them, but surprise us. That she was illiterate is only to be expected, for she was born in West Africa and brought to Brazil on a slaving ship at an early but unspecified age. Upon arrival in Salvador she was sold as part of a...

As street vendors and store owners constructed a citywide community, horizontal ties criss-crossed vertical ones, multiplying their contacts with a broad segment of the population. Business itself meant constructing networks, but those engaged in the food trade were not merely economic creatures. They had a variety of ties to others, pointing in many directions. From these connections they naturally built up solidarity with some and hostility toward others while deining themselves. Families, friendships, neighborhoods, and venues where they frequently gathered provided occasions for sociability and the sharing of cultural backgrounds as well as tense moments that could lead to negotiating...

Salvador’s port formed the hub of the food trade, with some spokes radiating into the city, and others linking it to points of supply in the hinterland. Sailors, captains, and boat owners connected farmers to the city’s grocers and street vendors, making Salvador’s inhabitants utterly dependent on them. The bay served as a path for cultural interchange because people on shore daily interacted with those who brought food across the water, with taken-for-granted urban understandings penetrating the interior and vice versa. To a degree, the ranks of those who sailed relected the shape of society at large, and for these...

Sailors, captains, and boat owners met stevedores and porters, petty traders and large merchants at Salvador’s bay-side grains market (see Map 1.3). Unlike the street vendors who had to jostle each other to purchase the vegetables, fruits, fish, and chickens arriving on boats at every beach and quay, men and women at the publicly administered grains market bent to specific institutional rules enforced by a small bureaucracy at a single location. Unlike grocery stores, the grains market centered on just four staples: rice, beans, corn, and, especially, manioc meal. Various kinds of people rubbed shoulders here and, by crossing paths...

Beef was the major source of animal protein for residents of Salvador. Not that they shunned pork, fish, whale meat, chicken, or eggs, but they hoped to eat red meat daily. The city consumed 350 to 600 head of cattle per week in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹ Although this number is moderate on a per capita basis, the symbolic importance of beef in this society must not be underestimated. A dearth of meat stood for danger and insecurity. City authorities took seriously their responsibility to ensure its supply at an affordable price, and the subject occupied a...

The work of supplying meat to Salvador reveals some of the cross-hatched tensions that permeated this society, as well as the way social distinctions could blur and alliances form. By and large, cattle merchants, butchers, and those who transported beef within the city shared a roughly equivalent social position. Some middlemen in the cattle and meat trade were mulattos, summoned along with their white counterparts to enforce its rules and yet, like them, sometimes described as mere creatures of the tanners and hide exporters. In contrast, free black workers at the slaughterhouse were badly paid and perceived as dangerous to...

For more than twelve months in 1822–1823, those struggling to free Brazil from Portuguese control laid siege to Salvador, where a Portuguese army was ensconced. The effort to cut off Salvador’s supply of food finally succeeded, and the Portuguese army, along with many merchants, set sail for Europe. Before examining the alternatives that local people faced, and the crucial political role they played in the high drama of bringing about this major political transformation, it is important to understand the war’s course. That task hinges on a close examination of the siege itself—never studied in detail before.

The...

The independence war in bahia sent shocks along the fault lines of Salvador’s society, causing undeniable upheaval. Had it continued for years, the result might well have been a radically reshaped socail order but it laset long enough for underyling tensions to surface. No one could fail to notice the precarious position of those at the top. Authority no longer remained openly unquestioned, and those with wealth and political power proved unable to fulfill their paternalistic role. Working people took on unprecedented roles. Slaves glimpsed possible freedom, and certainly gained leverage. The war ended before the old ways collapsed, but...

Beyond the day-to-day behavior of those engaged in the food trade, and beyond the devastating and speciic impact on them of a many-months-long war, there are questions about the government’s role in regulating the economy, about ideology, and about notions of justice and equity that directly affected those traders and the wider consuming public. As merchants and political leaders argued about rules for supplying essential provisions, their debates, both before and after the war, exposed differing views on the nature of a good society, on ethical behavior, and on the appropriate role of government. Having begun this book by concentrating...

Putting economic liberalism into practice after independence proved more difficult than the theoreticians could have imagined. As Salvador authorities dealt with the trade in foodstuffs from the 1820s to the 1860s, they veered back and forth from laissez faire policies to those on behalf of protecting consumers, changing direction more than once. Food traders and reformers argued that unfettered individual initiative would lead to competition, abundance, and lower prices, while many Salvadoreans saw the removal of price controls on food and the end of restrictions on traders as opening the way for profiteering by a few and hunger for the...