Ibicaba revisitada outra vez: espaço, escravidão e trabalho livre no oeste paulista¹

ABSTRACT

Ibicaba Farm, property of Senator Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro during the 19th century, was the subject of studies that focused on the experience with the sharecropping system. This article intends to undertake a revisit to Ibicaba through new lenses of observation. At first, it tries to insert Vergueiro's farm in the context of the changing World-economy of the first decades of the nineteenth century, and then highlight the importance of the spatial dimension of reality in this historical context. In the following two subitems, which constitute the core of the article, an analysis is made of the protocols - especially spatial - of control of the workers, used by the Vergueiros in order to extract the maximum of labor from slaves and sharecroppers, as well as the strategies that captives and immigrants used to escape from this surveillance. Finally, a brief recapitulation of the main points exposed and some considerations about the tensions that emerged in Ibicaba during the studied period are made.

KEYWORDS:
Slavery; Free Labor; Space; Ibicaba