The first of these books contains fifteen essays on aspects of Brazilian social history that Peter Eisenberg wrote during his academic career, three of which had not been published at the time of his death in 1988. Assembled in tribute by his colleagues at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), the book is arranged in four parts that reflect the author’s changing concerns and research interests.
The essays in part 1 are by-products of Eisenberg’s major study, The Sugar Industry of Pernambuco, 1840-1910 (1974). They include an analysis of the abolition process in Pernambuco (first published in HAHR in 1972) in which Eisenberg concluded that after slavery the sugar planters of that province preserved their traditional control over their workers, most of whom lived no better than slaves. In the second article in this part, a study of nineteenth-century efforts to promote immigration to Pernambuco, the author argued that, though climate and land scarcity were among the causes of the failure of most provincial immigration schemes, the main cause was economic stagnation. The last article in part 1 reveals the tragic consequences of the modernization of Pernambuco’s sugar industry in the late nineteenth century. The failure to initiate land reform, Eisenberg believed, was a major cause of the continuing dependence and poverty of the province’s rural proletariat after abolition.
Attitudes toward slavery and labor issues in general, particularly among planters of the Paraíba Valley and western São Paulo, are among the topics dealt with in part 2. Analyzing opinions expressed at agricultural congresses in 1878 in Rio and Recife, the author concluded that at that time at least the views of planters tended to coincide on questions of labor and slavery, regardless of their geographic interests. Part 3 contains studies dealing with the free Brazilian worker or “forgotten man” and with the manumission of slaves in Campinas. These latter essays, part of a growing body of work on manumission, clearly show that freeing a slave was a rare and highly selective event in Campinas until the 1880s when abolitionism and mass abandonment of plantations by slaves at last made manumission popular.
In the introduction to his first book Eisenberg revealed his initial intention to write a community study like Stanley Stein’s Vassouras, a plan frustrated by a lack of documentation. The essays in part 4 of this book indicate that near the end of his life he was again writing a community study using rich archival materials relating to Campinas. The high quality of the preliminary essays for this work suggests that with sufficient time he would have produced an important and innovative book on Campinas society and its early sugar industry. This collection of Peter Eisenberg’s shorter studies will be warmly welcomed by students of Brazilian social history.
Jacob Gorender has written a book that, like his earlier study of slavery, O escravismo colonial, should be translated into English. With a powerful analytical talent and a deep understanding of Brazilian history, in A escravidão reabilitada Gorender dissects the work of a group of historians whose recent books and articles are exerting a strong but sometimes misleading influence on the study of Brazilian slavery. Often claiming to be motivated by a desire to rediscover the slaves’ role in shaping their own lives, these historians, Gorender maintains, have put forward a collection of disparate and apparently unconnected theories that, taken together, seem intended to “rehabilitate” the image of slavery once associated with Gilberto Freyre and his followers.
Among the many questionable arguments these historians present, Gorender notes, are that slavery in Brazil was a contractual relationship between master and slave, agreed to and accepted by both; that slaves were protected by equitable laws and incentives that minimized violent or discordant reactions such as flight and revolt in favor of strategies that led to accommodation and peaceful coexistence; and that punishments were measured and moderate, served mainly to “educate” the slaves, and were seen by the latter as “just.” Slavery, it is said, was undermined or ameliorated by so-called breaches in the system, notably the brecha camponesa or opening toward peasantry of slaves allowed to cultivate plots of land to produce their own food. The demographic anomaly of a slave population unable to maintain itself by natural means is explained as the result not of slavery per se but of many extraneous and presumably unavoidable factors including Brazil’s tropical climate, African cultural practices, diseases carried on slave ships, inappropriate choices of marriage partners for slave women, and even certain customs and acts of the slaves themselves. Abolition, finally, is seen as a legal and orderly process forged by slaveholders and conservative statesmen and intended to bring about a free-labor system by slow, deliberate, and consensual means; the abolitionists, on the other hand, and even the runaways of the late 1880s, seem to have played minor roles in the liberation process.
As some of the above examples suggest, this new scholarship tends to underplay what was common or normal about Brazilian slavery (excessive labor, harsh punishments, resistance, population imbalance, disastrous child mortality, inadequate diet) and to overemphasize peripheral or atypical factors (legal protection, marriage, the family, manumission, the garden plot, the freeman), many of the same topics favored by the Freyre-Tannenbaum school. These, of course, are legitimate subjects for research and analysis, but stressing the exceptional at the expense of the common, even if well intended, can lead to distortions or misconceptions not easily rectified.
What has caused this scholarly phenomenon that involves more historians and students of slavery than can be mentioned in a brief review? Gorender suggests that it is the fruit of a conservative ideological enterprise disguised by ultramodern methodology and legitimized by the prestige and status of universities. The writing of history, he states in his conclusion, is not a neutral academic occupation but serves as the source of concepts that over time are incorporated into popular belief through education and the mass media.
My own reading of the same literature convinces me that Gorender’s criticisms go straight to the heart of a very serious problem, making this book one that ought to be read by every slavery specialist. Like his O escravismo colonial, it is a first-rate work of a gifted and honest scholar who knows his subject well and does not hesitate to speak his mind.
