This chapter examines the recruitment of coastal shipping workers in nineteenth-century Brazil, focusing on the province of Santa Catarina, and proposes hypotheses to be explored in other coastal regions that have not yet been studied from this perspective.
The analysis starts from a central question: who were the maritime workers and how did the persistence of slavery impact their work experiences in a world marked by constant displacement and the overlap of forms of coercion and freedom? By focusing on coastal shipping—the sector that concentrated the largest number of maritime workers in Brazil—the study contributes to expanding knowledge about this type of navigation and the ways in which it was linked to the exploitation of the workforce in the Empire.
(Translated from the abstract in Portuguese)