Seeking capture, resisting seizure: legal battles under the anglo-brazilian treaty for the suppression of slave trade (1826-1845)

• Autor(a) principal: Brito, Adriane Sanctis de
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/2/2139/tde-30102020-143337/
• topic: Anglo-Brazilian Treaty of 1826; Comércio negreiro; Direitos humanos; Escravidão; Mixed commissions; Prize law; Slave trade abolition; Tráfico internacional de pessoas -- Brasil; Estados Unidos; Grã-Bretanha; Use of force

The suppression of slave trade was an international-scale project undertaken by Britain during the nineteenth century. The execution of this project is usually depicted as a humanitarian crusade which relied on the power of British diplomacy in politics and of the British navy over the seas. Recently successful in the Napoleonic Wars, the mighty British Navy would now be sent to a new mission; yet the \"navy\'s work\" would have the support of a different kind of weapons, constructed with familiar legal material and supplemented with the capacity of mobilizing states in peacetime: triple-formula treaties. Those treaties provided for a set of rights and duties connected to visitation, capture and adjudication of vessels suspected of slave trade. They constituted mechanisms of enforcement to the provisions of slave-trade abolition through a legal use of force. Such utmost formula for enforcement was accepted by key states from the nineteenth-century slave trade. Brazil was one of them. By then, Brazil was tied to a paradox that reflected on its debut in international law. It had to affirm its recent independence by conserving the ties with the Portuguese political and legal past with Britain. As a slavery-based state, Brazil acquiesced to the AngloBrazilian Treaty for the suppression of slave trade (1826) while seeking recognition to its separation from the Portuguese Crown. Following the legal structure that had been brought from warfare prize law, the triple-formula brought criteria to evaluate the legality of visitation to suspected vessels and their eventual capture. Accordingly, the central points discussed in the legal spheres of the triple-formula interpretation concerned the limits of the use of force against foreign ships, even when they did benefit slave trade abolition, they were not fought as humanitarian legal grounds. While the triple formula of the treaty was in motion (up to 1845), the core battles of legal interpretation dealt with adjudication proceedings, criteria of nationality and jurisdiction. In those battles, Britain constantly pushed for the expansion of its legal use of force in balance with the conservation of its implementation system. Brazil acted to limit such use of force while maintaining cooperation. The process of constant reconstruction of such legal meanings culminated in interpretative extensions under British unilateral dominance; procedural law and bureaucratic hurdles; and a deeper specialization of the triple formula in relation to prize law and the general law of nations. Examining the triple formula in motion brings yet an important aspect to a fuller understanding of the Brazilian role in obstructing abolition. Brazil did not simply reject the treaty regime, as it might seem judging by its failure to implement an effective slave-trade proscription. When it came to the triple formula, Brazil actively engaged in implementing the terms under the treaty because this was a way of limiting Britain\'s use of force; to resist capture was both resisting abolition and the loss of autonomy. All in all, despite conserving some inequality of power from its starting point, the triple-formula regime created a field of contestation where both parties transformed and created their power conditions using the language of law.