Esplendor escravocrata / madrugada camponesa em Cabo Verde (séc. XV-XVIII)

Résumé

This doctoral dissertation offers an analysis of the History of Cape Verde interpreted as a singular process which combines two specific departures from the common pattern found in other colonial societies. Capeverdian history represents, in the first place, a departure from the 14th century pattern of Iberian colonization of the Macaronesian islands. On the basis of their geographical proximity and climatic similarity, the early colonists were able to reproduce the social model characteristic of the Iberian peninsula in the three northern archipelagos. But they were unable to do the same in the southern one. Cape Verde represents in this respect a break in this pattern owing to the climatic diversity and the attractiveness of the trade with the Guinean coast. Thus a space was for the first time created in which a predominantly African society was built under European domination. A society defined in an extensive and polinuclear way as a slave-based society characterised as a plantation economy, of an agro-export mercantile type; a Creole Euro-African society. The second departure refers to the fact that, having been transplanted as the dominant social model in the Atlantic region (in the Antilles, Colombia, Brazil, etc), Cape Verde was also the first place where this type of society failed earlier, becoming a predominatly peasant society already before the abolition of slavery. Besides its early development, this capeverdian “way out”, was rare in the Atlantic world, where the most common change was the proletarianazation of the slaves and their descendants, preserving or reforming the plantation economy. This work offers an analysis of a process of social change that covers three centuries (XV to XVIII) and is based on a wide array of sources which justify new explanatory hypotheses.