Laura Jarnagin’s book is ambitious in its chronological and geographic reach. She aims to reconstruct how networks of kinship, religion, and business formed in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century prepared the ground for Confederate migration to Brazil after the U.S. Civil War. Tracing the formation of these networks, Jarnagin devotes considerably more pages to the affairs of elite commercial families in Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Azores than to Brazil, which may surprise the reader, given the book’s subtitle. Although the text touches on the Brazilian connections throughout, only three chapters (8, 11, and 12) would qualify as Brazilian history in a conventional sense. Rather than highlight the migratory event itself, which was small on the scale of nineteenth-century transatlantic migrations, the book focuses on the deep context of Confederate migration to Brazil.
The book constitutes an exercise in applying Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s macro-analyses of capitalism to...
