Lei Áurea — Abolition of Slavery in Brazil
The Lei Áurea ('Golden Law'), signed by Princess Isabel on 13 May 1888, abolished slavery throughout Brazil — the last country in the Americas to do so. It was the most abrupt and least redistributive emancipation in the hemisphere: it freed roughly 700,000 enslaved people with no compensation to them, no land grant, and no programme of education or civic integration. Freed persons were simultaneously declared citizens and denied the means to exercise freedom. Land had been concentrated under the 1850 Lei de Terras; illiteracy barred most from voting; and the coffee economy's turn to subsidised Italian immigrant labour was designed in part to marginalise the ex-enslaved workforce. As a top-down legal restructuring of the basis of Brazilian society, the law was epochal — yet by alienating the planter class from the monarchy it directly precipitated the republican coup of 1889, paradoxically ending the regime most associated with gradual reform.
- Year: 1888 CE
- Category: Political
