Robert Edgar Conrad has made numerous contributions to the historiography of slavery in Brazil over the years, not the least of which has been his recent Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (1983). These documents, collected and translated by Conrad, provide many vivid (and terrible) insights into slave life in Brazil. Together they were intended, in part, to lay waste any remaining notions about the benign nature of Brazilian slavery.
In World of Sorrow, Conrad relentlessly pursues this same theme. It is a study that fairly bristles with a moral outrage aimed at the harshness of Brazilian slavery on the one hand, and those who created and perpetuated the myth of an easygoing master-slave relationship in Brazil on the other. Specialists today may find this very much a case of beating a dead horse. Yet the work was originally published in 1985, in Portuguese as Tumbeiros, presumably to assist in enlightening those Brazilians still wedded to the myth.
An initial chapter takes up the question of why there was the need for a three-hundred-year-long slave trade to Brazil. Conrad’s answer is low slave fertility because of a population top-heavy with males, and, most especially, high slave mortality because of overwork, undernutrition, and a general unconcern on the part of slave masters for the longevity of their slaves so long as those who died could be easily and cheaply replaced.
The following chapter deals with the legal slave trade, while taking issue with the slave import estimates of Philip Curtin for the whole of the slave trade period. Curtin placed that number at a bit over 3,500,000 slaves. Conrad suggests instead “that possibly more than 5,000,000 slaves entered Brazil during the whole period of the traffic . . ..” (p. 34). By agreeing with Joseph C. Miller that those slaves who reached Brazilian ports represented only 40 percent of those who were originally enslaved in Africa (with fully 60 percent dying in Africa or during the middle passage), Conrad is implicitly arguing that Brazil’s “peculiar institution” cost Africa some 12,500,000 lives.
The central focus of the study is on the contraband slave trade to Brazil from 1810 to midcentury, and reveals a kind of national conspiracy to thwart British abolitionist efforts. Certainly it was a successful one, for these were the years during which the tempo of the slave trade was most intense. Ironically, joining that conspiracy were British financial interests, as well as others in North America. Final chapters deal with the plight of the emancipados, captured illegal slaves who were legally freed only to be reduced to a slave-like status once again, and to the internal slave trade which saw perhaps 300,000 slaves moved from the Northeast and the province of Bahia to the coffee-growing regions of the provinces of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Based on unpublished documents from Brazil and Great Britain, a wealth of published documents, and a wide range of secondary materials, this study by necessity crosses terrain already covered by Leslie Bethell, Richard Graham, Herbert Klein, Alan K. Manchester, and others, including Conrad himself. Its contribution is to place the entire absorbing story under one cover while introducing many new materials and providing fresh insights. This is clearly an important book that joins very recent work by Mary Karasch and Stuart Schwartz in documenting a grim fate indeed for slaves destined for or laboring in Brazil. It is made even more useful by lavish footnoting and an extensive bibliography.
