Labour citizenship and racial hierarchies in Brazil: social law, post-abolition and institutional selectivity

Abstract

The formation of Brazilian social law is usually told as a linear advance towards citizenship. This article looks at it from another angle, that of the racial hierarchies that survived abolition and were reorganised within the order of free labour. Its object is the relationship between law, race and labour in the period running from independence to the 1943 Consolidation of Labour Laws, attentive to the long duration of the restricted citizenship inherited from the colonial and imperial past. The question asks how republican and Vargas-era social legislation, while speaking the language of universal protection, reorganised the racial inequality inherited from slavery. The hypothesis holds that this legislation turned the hierarchy of colour into a hierarchy of occupation, tying access to protection to criteria of recognised profession, formalisation and discipline that fell unequally on the black population. The method comes from a Thompson-inspired social history of law, attentive to the experience of subjects and to the social uses of law. The sources combine the period's legal texts, from the criminalisation of vagrancy to article 7 of the Labour Code, with the historiography of post-abolition and race relations. The analysis shows that the exclusion of domestic and rural workers gave legal form to this inequality. The contribution lies in reading labour law as a product of racialised social relations rather than as a neutral achievement.