'Uteis a si e a sociedade' or a brief guide to creolisation in nineteenth-century Brazil: black women, mobility, marriage and markets in Salvador da Bahia (1830-1888).

In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation. These markers are read as statements about belonging on the part of formerly enslaved women and their female descendants in a racially based slave society that was also formally and informally patriarchal in structure and Catholic in culture. The historical sources are used to provide a measure of the momentum of mobility engendered by manumission and passed down through the generations of freed and free black women, and reveal the limitations of mobility made possible either economically through occupation or socially through marriage. Analysed collectively, the wills and testaments of these women provide insights into the ways in which race and gender shaped the contours and confines of freedom in Salvador in particular and Brazilian slave society in general and reveal how perceptions and experiences of the limitations of integration shaped their versions of creolisation as well as their visions of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]