Frédéric Mauro, professor at the University of Paris X and author of Le Portugal et l’Atlantique, must surely be France’s most eminent authority on the history of Brazil. His latest contribution is a textbook for classroom use but with enough insights to make it interesting for the specialist too. The most competent parts deal with economic history, as becomes a man trained in the Braudel tradition; yet the narrative as a whole, complete with flashbacks, is recognizable even as conventional history. It is not quite a history of the colonial period because it ends abruptly, around 1800. The background of independence, from Pombal to the liberal revolutions, is not touched upon in the manner that a chronologically longer purview would have permitted.
The book reflects recent or rather recent research in Portuguese, French, and English. It is also the latest in a long line of French books of uneven quality on Brazil that begins in the sixteenth century with André Thévet and Jean de Léry, continues through the seventeenth and eighteenth with Claude d’Abbeville, Yves d’Évreux, the Lettres Édifiantes, Lafitau, Raynal, and assorted travelogs, blossoms in the nineteenth with St.-Hilaire and Ferdinand Denis, and moves solidly into our own times with Alfred Métraux, Roger Bastide, and Germain Bazin.
I enjoyed the book and learned new things from it, but it has faults that are proper to surveys and others that could have been avoided. I would have liked a more thoughtful presentation, a larger treatment of the spiritual dimension, and a greater integration of Brazil within its imperial and Atlantic context. The work is marred by an embarrassing number of errors of fact, an obliviousness to Portuguese accents, a facile comparison with Spain and Spanish America (without any understanding of the individuality of the Portuguese), and omissions that must be explained by limitations of space.
Despite these observations, the book does not detract from the author’s reputation. Mauro is a man of scholarly attainments and intellectual honesty. He writes without the encumbrance of an ideological straitjacket. He has avoided the tendency that some foreigners have to moralize. Although he was not able to avoid every pitfall, the total achievement, when seen in the light of its parameters, is successful.
