Abstract

FLORENTINO, Manolo  and  AMANTINO, Marcia. Escapes, quilombos and fugitives in the Americas (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries). Anál. Social [online]. 2012, n.203, pp.236-267. ISSN 0003-2573.

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 self-sufficiency.

Keywords : quilombos; escape; America; slavery.

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