Abstract
We study fifteen documents of conditional sales of slaves registered in Casa Branca, Province of São Paulo, in the 1870s. In these documents 25 slaves were negotiated. These few transactions illustrate adjustments to the contracts between buyers and sellers suitable to a region that was the frontier of the expansion of the coffee culture in the province. In several instances the slaves remained with their sellers, at least temporarily. In these cases, we suggest that the sales were, in fact, a way of obtaining financing; the potential sellers were not willing to renounce their human property, and the potential buyers, even though wanting those slaves, were actually functioning, at least temporarily, a kind of lending institution offering mortgage loans using the people negotiated as securit. In other cases, in which the slaves were delivered to the buyers, it is possible to suggest that the transactions actually disguised a “test period” before the sales were completed. Furthermore, in some situations we identified similarities with characteristics of slave hiring or indeed of the urban category of “escravos de ganho”. In conclusion, there were cases of transactions that were carried out because the buyers were already creditors of the sellers.