Reconsidering Recruitment in Imperial Brazil

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8876996
AutoresHendrik Kraay (0000-0002-6796-4942, University of Calgary, autor de correspondencia)
Año1998
Volumen55
Número1
Páginas1-33
Fecha de publicación1998-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-1615 • E-ISSN: 1533-6247
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1008292
OpenAlexW2011118789
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas14

Third Sergeant Wenceslau Martins Leal may have misunderstood his orders for 18 July 1888 but his greater mistake was, in fact, carrying them out too well. With his patrol from the Sixteenth Infantry Battalion, he reported to the police subdelegate of Salvador’s São Pedro parish at 7:00 p.m. and received orders to arrest and take to the fort “all the vagrants that he could find, for the time had come for impressment [ recrutamento forçado ].” Because the subdelegate did not limit the number of men to be impressed and pointed out the best places to find such “vagabonds”—Dois de Julho Square and the nearby alleys—Leal concluded that he had unlimited authority to put his ten men to work on this “arduous task.” It only took an hour. In a first sweep, they picked up thirty-five men; in a second, seventeen more. Two resisted “tenaciously” and had to be forcibly subdued. By 8:00, the duty officer had developed serious misgivings about the large number of prisoners arriving at the fort. He checked with the subdelegate who denied having given such orders in the first place and released the detainees. An indignant Leal justified his actions on the grounds that he had merely followed orders to the best of his ability

Duty · Infantry · Mistake · Officer · Political science · Sociology · Square (algebra · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · History of Colonial Brazil · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law