In this well-researched and clearly written book, José Juan Pérez Meléndez offers well-supported, revisionist analyses about the significance of voluntary migration to Brazil in the nineteenth century. The author challenges the idea that colonization was solely a response to the anticipated closure of the transatlantic slave trade and the eventual abolition of slavery itself. Rather, he shows how state goals and private ambition aligned in the development of colonization projects and contributed to the development of the Brazilian nation. What Pérez Meléndez calls “directed migration” served multiple goals—as labor solution, means to populate Brazil with preferred categories of immigrants, and, above all, a way to earn profits.
Pérez Meléndez demonstrates that postindependence migrations to Brazil were carefully planned and potentially lucrative. Entrepreneurs negotiated handsome concessions from the state including interest-free loans, land grants, transportation subsidies, and per capita bonuses for every colono (colonist) recruited. Friendship and kinship groups tended to...
