WI: a Brazilians slave revolt succeeded

Chimera0205

Banned
What if a Slave revolt organized by the Quilombos managed to fully kick the Portugese out of Brazil and estabilshed a black lead state Ala Haiti. How would such a nation fare? What effect would it have on trans atlantic slavery as a whole?
 
First of all, quilombos are maroon communities that dotted the Brazilian countryside. People just happened to be lucky enough to flee plantations and found their own hidden villages, called quilombos. They're not some organized political entity, it's just the name for villages of runway slaves.

A country-wide revolt is impossible IMHO. It's too big of a country, look at a map. I don't thing there ever was a slave revolt this big.
 
Well, i think this is ASB. The population of black slaves in colonial Brazil never reached more than one third, and, as Lampiao said, quilombos are just little villages. The only region that could "make a Haiti" is Bahia (They tried during the Conjuração Baiana ), but it would still be difficult as all Bahia itself is too big to be fully taken and had a big white/mixed-race population. Brazil is not a Caribbean island.
 
But didnt Zumbi actually almost do exactly what I described in the OP?

Not exactly. Zumbi didn't start a slave revolt, he was the leader of a quite big quilombo (as I said a village formed mostly by runaway slaves), local lords got scared with the size of the quilombo and ordered its destruction, he was only trying to protect his land. Smaller quilombos never stopped popping out though and a lot of them still exist today.
 

Chimera0205

Banned
First of all, quilombos are maroon communities that dotted the Brazilian countryside. People just happened to be lucky enough to flee plantations and found their own hidden villages, called quilombos. They're not some organized political entity, it's just the name for villages of runway slaves.

A country-wide revolt is impossible IMHO. It's too big of a country, look at a map. I don't thing there ever was a slave revolt this big.
Ok but what of they DID organize?
 
Ok but what of they DID organize?

Quite impossible IMO, the logistics of it would be too nightmarish to even imagine, as we have to ask how communication would happen considering most of Quilombos existed in isolation in extremely remote areas so getting more than a very small amount of them together is already Herculean task, leadership dispute, and many more that would come from trying to create an United front.
 

Chimera0205

Banned
Quite impossible IMO, the logistics of it would be too nightmarish to even imagine, as we have to ask how communication would happen considering most of Quilombos existed in isolation in extremely remote areas so getting more than a very small amount of them together is already Herculean task, leadership dispute, and many more that would come from trying to create an United front.
But wasnt the haitian revolt largely orchestrated by free blacks and runaways living in Quilombos like settlements?
 
Ok but what of they DID organize?

Assuming you could even get co-ordination among any decent number and more than a handful of guns in the region go missing, than the Brazilians would come down on them like a tone of bricks. The quilombos existed because they were small, in out of the way places, and not actively trying to undermine the society they had run away from and so making it more trouble than it would be worth to find and exterminate them. The second they look like they could actually pose a credible threat (Like with Zumbi, as @Lampiao pointed out) that protection through innocuousness disappears.

But wasnt the haitian revolt largely orchestrated by free blacks and runaways living in Quilombos like settlements?

The revolts in Haiti (It wasen't a centeralized effort) only really materialized because they massively outnumbered every other segment of society, there was zero chance of outside support, every other faction in the colony was tearing eachother to shreds, and half the time their big leaders had the Spainish and British running them guns because French Revolutionary Wars. None of these factors applies to Brazil
 
One of the main reasons why there never was a serious large scale slave uprising in Brazil was that Brazilian slavery was much more flexible than Caribbean and North American slavery in general. The latter was strictly bound to race all the time and you couldn’t easily escape, while Brazilian society had something like 20% of a free black population. Manumission was a standard practice and slaves could expect freedom. If not for them, for their future generations. Meanwhile the free black population actively supported the system. Due to this flexibility, and also due to a more balanced demography, Brazilian slavery could never have exploded. Slave uprisings only grew in numbers in the 19th century, when the slave trade was abolished and manumission went out of use because of that.
 
Top