Demonstrating that the transatlantic slave trade was controlled by merchants living in Brazil and analyzing the role of enslaved people in the education of their own families were part of the main contributions of the studies of Manolo Garcia Florentino, a retired professor from the Institute of History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He died in Rio de Janeiro on March 12, at the age of 63, after heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Cacilda Machado\u2014also a retired UFRJ professor\u2014and his daughter, Maria.<\/p>\n
Born in Esp\u00edrito Santo in 1958, Florentino obtained his undergraduate degree in history from Fluminense Federal University (UFF), and his master\u2019s degree from the College of Mexico (COLMEX) in 1985. He got his PhD from UFF in 1991, under the direction of Ciro Flamarion Cardoso (1942\u20132013). In 1988, he joined the UFRJ History Department, now called the Institute of History, from which he retired in 2019. In 2009, Florentino received the National Order of Scientific Merit, and from 2013 to 2015, he was chairman of the Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlorentino, his students, and colleagues provided a fundamental understanding of slavery and the internal slave trade in Rio de Janeiro,\u201d explained US historian Herbert S. Klein, from Columbia and Stanford Universities in the United States, in an email interview given to Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em>. According to Klein, who studies slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, Florentino\u2019s most important achievement was exploring local archives to reveal how the system worked. \u201cAlong with the new schools of historical research developed in Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul, and S\u00e3o Paulo, his efforts turned Brazil into the world\u2019s leading center for the study of the history of American slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n UFRJ historian Jo\u00e3o Lu\u00eds Ribeiro Fragoso recalls Florentino\u2019s key role in revising Brazil\u2019s historiography by maintaining, throughout his studies, that the country\u2019s economy was not limited to agricultural exports to European metropoles. In his first book, Em costas negras \u2013 Uma hist\u00f3ria do tr\u00e1fico de escravos entre a \u00c1frica e o Rio de Janeiro<\/em> (s\u00e9culos XVIII e XIX)<\/em> (On the backs of Blacks \u2013 A history of the slave trade between Africa and Rio de Janeiro [eighteenth and nineteenth centuries]) (Brazilian National Archives, 1993), Florentino shows that the slave trade, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, was controlled by merchants that lived in Rio de Janeiro. \u201cThis means that, even as a colony of Portugal, Brazil\u2019s economy did not depend solely on its relations with that country,\u201d explains Fragoso. The book defends that slavery\u2014which Florentino calls \u201csoul trade\u201d\u2014endured in Brazil not solely due to the interests of European capital in the international market. \u201cUntil the 1980s, Brazil was described as dependent and obedient toward what were, at the time, central economies in the Atlantic slave trade. Florentino questioned Brazil\u2019s active role in prolonging slavery,\u201d points out Fragoso.<\/p>\n Together with Fragoso, Florentino published O arca\u00edsmo como projeto<\/em> (Archaism as a project) (Diadorim Publishing, 1993), which changed the way we perceive the context of the Atlantic trade, agricultural society, and the merchant elites. The book questions the work of historian Caio Prado J\u00fanior (1907\u20131990) and economist Celso Furtado (1920\u20132004), who both perceived Colonial Brazil to be entirely dependent on the Portuguese metropole and with no internal market.<\/p>\n Florentino was one of the first to conduct research on enslaved families, resulting in the publication of A paz das senzalas<\/em> (The peace of the slave quarters) (Civiliza\u00e7\u00e3o Brasileira Publishing, 1997), written with Jos\u00e9 Roberto G\u00f3es from Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). The book describes enslaved peoples and their leading role in the education of their own families, illustrating how they reacted to daily situations in search of better living conditions. Florentino was also one of the creators of the Slave Voyages database, which provides information on approximately 35,000 slaving expeditions that occurred between 1514 and 1866.<\/p>\n According to historian Jos\u00e9 Inaldo Chaves Junior, from the University of Bras\u00edlia (UnB), Florentino and his contemporaries analyzed a vast number of documents\u2014from parish and ecclesiastical archives to slavery ship listings, wills, and inventories\u2014and scrutinized colonization \u201cfrom the inside,\u201d seeking to find the names and faces of its main participants. \u201cHe was directly involved in the consolidation of Africanist studies in Brazil, emphasizing how crucial they are to understanding Brazilian society itself,\u201d explains Chaves J\u00fanior.<\/p>\n Historian Hebe Mattos, from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), shares that she met Florentino during her undergraduate studies in history at UFF, and that they later became PhD classmates. \u201cOur academic encounters at the beginning of our careers were, for me, both foundational and absolutely memorable,\u201d she recalls. Mattos believes that, by framing the slave trade as an object of research, considering the historical particularities on both sides of the Atlantic, Florentino launched a research agenda that never ceased to unfold into new approaches and perspectives in Brazil, Africa, and in world history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Historian Manolo Florentino developed iconic studies on the transatlantic slave trade ","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":395764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1348],"tags":[241],"coauthors":[1600],"class_list":["post-395250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituary","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395772,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395250\/revisions\/395772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395250"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=395250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}