Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil

Seditious Spaces tells the story of the Tailor's Conspiracy, an anti-colonial, anti-racist plot in Bahia, Brazil that involved over thirty people of African descent and one dozen whites. On August 12, 1798, the plot was announced to residents through bulletins posted in public spaces across the city demanding racial equality, the end of slavery, and increases to soldiers' pay: an act that transformed the conspiracy into a case of sedition. Routinely acknowledged by experts as one of the first expressions of Brazilian independence, the conspiracy was the product of groups of men with differing statuses and agendas who came together and constructed a rebellion. In this first book-length study on the conspiracy in English, Greg L. Childs sheds light on how relations between freed people, slaves, soldiers, officers, market women, and others structured political life in Bahia, and how the conspirators drew on these structures to plot, help, and heal each other through the resistance.