Escapes, quilombos and fugitives in the Americas (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries)

• Autor(a) principal: Florentino, Manolo
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Amantino, Marcia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.2012203.01
• topic: quilombos; fugas; América; escravismo; quilombos; escape; America; slavery; .

This work attempts to address the lack of a systematic study of the communities of runaway slaves in the Americas. Characteristically, there is a tendency to put together under the same category settlements that accommodated fewer than ten or twelve fugitives and lasted for only a few weeks or months and others (such as was the case of Palmares) that included up to 11,000 settlers and lasted for almost a century. This conceptual anomaly is here taken as a sign that we are in bad need of a taxonomy that allows for a study of quilombos (settlements of runaway slaves) as truly historical structures which may be no more than a small band of refugees but may also evolve to include communities that achieved a considerable measure of economic and populational selfsufficiency.