Lunch Talk: Marcelo Ferraro, "The Political Economy of Punishment under the Second Slavery"

"The Political Economy of Punishment under the Second Slavery"
Marcelo Ferraro
WIGH Global Fellow, Spring 2015 and Fall 2019; PhD Candidate in History, Universidade de São Paulo

Paper available by request.

Marcelo's research focuses on criminal law, capital crimes and capital punishment in the nineteenth-century Brazil and in the United States—more specifically in the Mississippi Valley and in Vale do Paraiba. The dissertation will present different scales of analysis, in which the global economy and national politics play important roles, connected to the local and regional experiences of these two dynamic slave societies.

This essay synthesizes important information in national and global context, focusing on capital crimes in both regions. I present the main hypothesis and concepts, and the footnotes summarize the reference studies that support them.