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Comment by bXVsbGVy | Hacker News Reader

Some historical context about Brazilian independence (1822).

In 1807, United Kingdom prohibited slave trade in their colonies and pressed Portugal (that had very close relationship with UK) to do the same.

But Brazilian economy depended on slave labor. And land owners weren't having it.

Dom Pedro I declared the independence to calm down the the elite while keeping the country under Portugal influence -- the newly independent country was a monarchy with an imperator from the Portuguese Royal family.

Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

But hey, at least the country didn't break into many small nations. And avoided wars. So in the end it was good I guess \s.

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> Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

Nope, there were dozens of countries that abolished slavery later than Brazil. The most recent was Mauritania, in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

I believe Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, but far from the last country in the world as a whole to do so.

To be precise. Brazil was the last country from the West to abolish slavery.

Almost 40% of slaves traded over the Atlantic went to Brazil.

The US still permits slavery (as punishment for a crime):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Only counting slaves traded over the Atlantic is already a cop out.

One will say that communism, fascism and socialism enslave, and other will say that capitalism does. What was the difference between a concentration camp, gulag or a plantation? How far they are from the modern slavery from Bolivians in Brazil? Food for thoughts

> Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

Dom Pedro I tried to abolish the slavery in the very beginning of our independence. What stop him? The Congress. And he respected the congress because he wasn’t a dictator. The same thing happened with Dom Pedro II, who spent his life trying to end slavery.

People think that a monarch can do whatever he wants, but this is not true. Only dictators can do whatever they want.

Words are cheap, aren't they, and even then there weren't that many words. In practical terms, what remains is basically no action against slavery, apart from some externally-pressured laws just to keep up appearances. It literally is the origin of the expression "pra inglês ver" (for the English to see)

It was a different time. It’s easy to misjudge the past without fully understanding the context of that time.

> In 1807, United Kingdom prohibited slave trade in their colonies and pressed Portugal (that had very close relationship with UK) to do the same.

... and at the same time replaced them with "indentured labour", who just so happened to be poor Indians famished by savagery of the British taxes and the famines they unleashed, and had little choice or say in pretty much anything.

Kind of like how Indian-labour is now treated in Middle-East and elsewhere and the Indian-state exploits them for its own foreign policy.

Extraordinary tactic to kill your competition.

Yeah. It always all about economy.

Not long after slavery was abolish; loitering became a crime. See "Vagrancy Act 1824".

Ending slavery is overrated. In Suriname the black slaves were replaced with workers from India who amusingly were treated even worse. Plantation economy was what made life terrible in South America but people always get hung up on the slavery part.

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