Review: A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826-1865

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tive public health outreach and education. Other studies merely reinforced elite prejudices by confirming that nordestino bodily proportions made them especially “adept at laboring in a stooped position” ( p. 211). Additionally, many state-run initiatives arguably were more concerned with surveillance of poor nonwhites than health delivery. A case in point was the mandate that obliged Afro-Brazilian religious sects to register with the state’s Mental Hygiene Service in order to practice their faith free from police repression. In exchange, they had to submit to the intrusive gaze of the scientific observer who then made pronouncements about their subnormal intelligence and racial primitivism. While this book is superb in the details, Blake’s overarching thesis that the nordestino became a distinct racial category by the 1930s remains more suggestive than conclusive. This may derive, in part, from Blake’s explicit refusal to define nordestino, a legitimate intellectual choice made due to the multiple meanings the term assumed over time. However, this choice contributed to lack of clarity about how the category of the purportedly stoic, backward, ignorant sertanejo of the interior (imagined as white or mestiço) could come to coexist with the coastal Afro-Brazilian candomblé practitioner within the single racial category of nordestino. While corporatist statesmen like Agamemnon Magalhães sought to erase racial difference as a means to achieve social harmony, this was accomplished by actively repressing Afro-Brazilian sects to the point of insisting that the state’s population was 100 percent Catholic. Rather than incorporating Afro-Brazilians as nordestinos, they were systematically erased as a formal category, much in the same way that ideologies of mestizaje in Mexico and elsewhere in Spanish America destabilized the category of Indian. The Pernambucan case, therefore, seems more like a conflation of the categories of sertanejo and nordestino than the creation of a new overarching category. These conceptual reservations aside, this book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of how regional and national identity formation intersects with the process of state building. Blake also provides a nuanced intellectual, cultural, and political history of a region understudied within twentieth-century Brazilian history.

judy bieber, University of New Mexico doi 10.1215/00182168-1902850

A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826–1865. By tâmis parron. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. 373 pp. Paper. Brazilian historian Tâmis Parron argues in this study that during the nineteenth century the defense of slavery formed a “network of political and social relations” ( p. 18) whose internal logic and broader historical connections were not the mere result of the existence of the institution. Rather, political debates about slavery were a “vector of partisan, ideological, and parliamentary relations” ( p. 16) throughout the early and central decades of the century, when Brazil’s institutions as an independent empire were designed and tested at both the local and the international level. While political disputes focusing on

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slavery are a well-known subject in Brazilian historiography, Parron’s insight into the politics of slavery truly enriches our understanding of the process of nation building after independence (1822) and of the conservative hegemony in parliament between 1835 and the early 1850s. Echoing David Brion Davis’s approach in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Parron shows how postindependent Brazilian elites erected a nation-state following the model of classical liberalism while relying on a slave labor force. To resolve the contradiction between popular sovereignty and the exclusion of a high number of individuals, the representatives to the 1823 constituent assembly granted equal citizenship rights to all free men born on Brazilian soil, regardless of race. Slaves could become future citizens, and as long as they were born in Brazil, they had the same rights as other free men. Slavery became acceptable to a nation-state founded on modern notions of citizenship. Between independence and 1835 the prestige of liberalism as a political ideology also translated into the formulation of abolitionist ideas in the press and in parliament. Pressure from Britain led Brazil to sign a bilateral treaty outlawing the traffic in 1826, and later to pass the Law of November 7, 1831, which not only restated the prohibition of the traffic but also liberated Africans who had come to Brazil before that date. This was not simply a law “for the English to see,” Parron argues, but rather responded to the push for liberal reform and to the belief that slavery would disappear within some years. Nevertheless, starting in 1835 the recently formed Conservative or Saquarema Party adopted the defense of slavery and the legal toleration of the slave traffic as a cornerstone of its program. Here is where this study makes the most significant contributions. Parron clearly shows how the Saquaremas obtained firm support from the coffee planters of the Paraíba valley (which crosses the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais), who in turn were gaining importance and cohesion as a planter elite. The conservatives presented numerous projects in parliament, the press, and local councils to repeal the 1831 law; they also centralized political and juridical power in the imperial capital, which allowed them to make sure that local authorities would never impede the clandestine transportation of slaves. Thanks to this politics of slave contraband, between 1835 and 1840 more than a quarter million enslaved Africans were introduced in Brazil, 540 percent more than in the previous five years ( p. 173). As Parron convincingly argues, conservative hegemony, political centralization, and tolerance of the slave traffic were different faces of the same polyhedron. Whereas the Liberal Party remained internally divided, Saquarema preeminence in government and in parliament continued throughout the 1840s. By then, British pressure to enforce the prohibition of slavery through the Aberdeen Act (1845) became more intense, to the point that the British navy seized more than 400 Brazilian ships in coastal Africa in these years and even entered Brazilian ports in 1850. That year Brazil passed another law prohibiting the traffic of enslaved Africans, and this time the prohibition was enforced. After the end of the traffic, Brazilian representatives focused on avoiding public debate on the institution of slavery itself, although this was no longer feasible after slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865. Brazil was left as the only slave-

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holding nation in the hemisphere after a decades-long defense of the peculiar institution and its traffic, based not only on simple economic necessity but also on the hypocrisy of the abolitionist movement or on Christian doctrine, which allegedly tolerated slavery. Parron’s discussion of political debates in different institutional spaces is very meticulous and constantly bridges the gaps in the existing bibliography. He even brings slave agency into the political discussion by analyzing the impact of slave revolts, although sometimes we miss a more in-depth treatment, beyond episodic events, of how slave resistance impacted the politics of slavery. Overall, however, Parron’s study not only contributes to the study of Brazilian imperial politics but also illuminates the unexpected connections between the politics of slavery and the political, partisan, administrative, and international conflicts of the period.

oscar de la torre, University of North Carolina at Charlotte doi 10.1215/00182168-1902859

Cleansing Honor with Blood: Masculinity, Violence, and Power in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, 1845–1889. By martha s. santos. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. xvii, 295 pp. Cloth, $65.00. This book, based on Martha Santos’s 2004 University of Arizona doctoral dissertation, is a welcome contribution to the field of northeastern Brazilian rural history. Santos examines the ways in which the use of violence by men from this region is related to a changing socioeconomic structure rather than being an innate part of their character or culture. She moves away from a recent emphasis on the discourse surrounding the northeast and its people and focuses instead on land registries, postmortem inventories, and criminal records. Anyone who has done research in northeastern Brazilian archives will recognize the challenges she faced, as climate, bugs, and poverty conspire to destroy documents, but Santos makes us feel confident in her conclusions. She also peppers her text with her own fine translations of the colloquial Portuguese of popular poets, which certainly adds flavor and zest to the text. Santos does an excellent job of explaining the changing socioeconomic conditions in the semiarid backlands of Ceará. She convincingly delineates the rise of commercial agriculture to supplement and not replace cattle ranching and the surprising proliferation of small landholders by the middle of the nineteenth century. The rural poor at this time had a certain measure of autonomy and control over their lives. As opportunities in commercial agriculture increased, however, not least because of the demand for cotton, so did competition over land and water. Rural males found that they needed to protect their claims to land as well as to prove that they were honorable men who could provide for their families, and they became zealous in their efforts to do so. I wondered at first at the author’s decision to employ a rather traditional time frame, beginning in the 1840s when the imperial state began to coalesce and ending with the fall of the monarchy (although she never seeks to incorporate this event into her analysis). I am convinced that her starting point is a good one, since one of her contributions is to