O Lazareto da Gamboa no Valongo: análises comparadas de “sistema” e “experiência” (1811-1831)

Abstract

This study investigates the Lazareto da Gamboa in Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the nineteenth century, based on the recognition of its peripheral presence in the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade and the Valongo complex. The dissertation aims to demonstrate the Lazareto’s role as an instrument of sanitary and administrative screening of enslaved Africans, situating it within the political, economic, and urban dynamics of the period. Given the scarcity of direct documentation, the research adopts the evidentiary paradigm, articulated with comparative history and the concept of historical experience, through the analysis of legal records, parish registers, cartography, archaeological remains, and the press. The study demonstrates that the Lazareto functioned as a device integrating health practices, surveillance, and the economic management of slavery. The investigation addresses the role of health inspections, disputes between the Crown and slave traders, questions of medical legitimacy, and the spatial organization of the port as elements that reveal the mechanisms of the political system operating in Valongo. It concludes that combining systems theory with the history of experience allows institutional structures to be interpreted without separating them from human agency. In this way, the study proposes a methodological model for fragmented objects, highlighting the Lazareto as a key component of the nineteenth-century slave system rather than a peripheral quarantine space.