The books under review here are in many ways representative of the major orientations that seem to characterize recent studies of Brazilian slavery. The word “slavery” can be expressed in Portuguese by either escravismo or escravidão, and these terms symbolize two somewhat distinct approaches to the topic of slavery. Escravismo has come to mean slavery as an economic system or as a “mode of production”; escravidão is used commonly to speak of the institution of slavery, its conditions, and the life of the people who lived within it. The books of Gorender and Mattoso are securely in one and the other camp and, despite the flaws or faults of either, they demonstrate the health of scholarly interest in the history of Brazilian slavery in Brazil today.
Jacob Gorender’s book is aptly titled because it is primarily concerned with slavery as an economic system. Gorender’s central questions are: what is the nature of slavery as a productive mode, and what was the effect of slavery on the economy of Brazil? These are the classic questions, but he has worked them out with a thoroughness, thoughtfulness, and forcefulness that are challenging and provocative, although sometimes plainly wrong.
The book is organized in such a way that all of the concerns of escravismo studies are included. A long introductory section of six chapters deals with theoretical aspects of the mode of production, categories such as slave, plantation, and labor, and Portuguese expansion from a Marxist viewpoint. Gorender believes that the “colonial slave mode of production” was a specific form, unlike ancient slavery, certainly not feudal, and definitely not capitalist. He then tries to establish what he calls the “specific laws” of this system. Some of these are interesting and illuminating, but many seem to be tautologies at best or silliness at worst. He argues, for example, for a “law of rigidity of slave labor, ” that investment in slaves is inelastic because the work force cannot be increased or diminished to meet need. While this is true of slaves, it is also true of machines in a modern factory. Moreover, Gorender is led astray by his discussion of Caribbean sugar plantations where the zafra lasts for only five months. In Brazil it was often extended for nine months, thus leaving little time when slaves were underoccupied. Gorender has read a wide variety of published sources with great care and much of what he says is perceptive; but the desire to turn these insights into general laws basically fails.
The remainder of the volume deals with a variety of themes: the importance of land and rent; slavery in mining, ranching, and cities; and the processes of marketing and sale. Gorender is at his best in his comments on the existing slavery scholarship in Brazil and hardly an author from Gilberto Freyre to Octávio Ianni escapes his criticism. In fact, he is much more anxious to debate and criticize authors whose positions are similar to his own than he is to deal with, or even read, authors who do not write in a Marxist context.
In a number of places, traditional Marxist positions are taken when the evidence points in the opposite direction. He presents an argument for the existence of large slave units and high levels of concentration in Minas Gerais when the data demonstrate exactly the contrary. His presentation of slave labor as “backward” and incompatible with technological progress is a position now very much open to question. In general, however, this is one of the clearest and most interesting expositions of Marxist theory applied to Brazilian slavery as an economic system, and it is a book to which specialists and students will turn either for authority or straw men.
Katia Mattoso’s volume is a very different kind of book. It is a study of escravidão, as its title indicates, and it has the great advantage of placing the slave in the center of the history not simply as a type of labor, but as an actor whose culture, actions, and decisions influenced the operation of the system.
Êire esclave is written with verve and grace for a general readership as part of a popular French historical series. It has no footnotes and is limited by the series’ format in the space it can devote to some topics. From the excellent bibliography and the text, however, specialists will quickly recognize that the book summarizes much of the most recent research on Brazilian slavery. The volume is organized into three large sections. The first, “être vendu comme esclave,” deals with the slave trade, its organization, prices, and mechanisms. The last section devotes three chapters to manumission and the role of the freedman, much of it based on Mattoso’s own research. Only the middle section’s three chapters are concerned with slavery per se and one of these, in fact, deals with quilombos and marronnage. While most of the central questions in slave studies are at least touched upon and while specialists will find little new here, the book does serve its primary purpose of presenting a well-written summary of the field for the general reader.
The book has two flaws. The lack of a major section on labor, its types, conditions, and relation to the economy as a whole is noticeable by its absence. Slaves are sold, acculturate, rebel, and get freedom, but they do not seem to work much. Because Mattoso eschews the discussion of labor she also avoids confrontation with some of the more theoretical questions about slavery as a mode of production, the relationship of slavery to economic development, or slavery’s impact on industrialization, exactly those issues of most interest to the escravismo school. And so the strengths of Gorender are the weaknesses of Mattoso, and vice versa.
Mattoso’s volume will not receive the same sort of attention and debate when it appears in Portuguese (it is currently in the process of translation) because it does not address the classic questions of Brazilian economic history, but I suspect that in the long run its influence may be more lasting than Gorender’s book because it summarizes and reorients the trajectory that new research will take.
