This collection of essays has the rare virtue of being useful both for specialists and for those beginning their studies of Brazilian slavery. For the former, the book provides a well-informed, up-to-date summary of the achievements and insufficiencies of the field. The latter—as well as students of slavery in the Americas in general—will find an introduction to the existing literature, an inventory of current debates, and many suggestions about where scholarship on this central issue of Brazilian history is likely to go in the future.
A historiographical review that evaluates major trends in the study of Brazilian slavery over the past three decades constitutes the first essay. Other pieces refer to central aspects of the slave regime and slave lives: work, which is placed “at the core of analysis of slavery” (p. x); slavery and the economy, particularly the interaction between slavery and peasantry; slave resistance; and the slave family. The common concern informing all the essays is that slavery is studied as a “constantly shifting relationship between masters and slaves within the framework of juridical, cultural, and economic realities that formed its structure” (p. 164). Stuart Schwartz therefore argues that slaves cannot be depicted as passive objects of oppression; but also that it is impossible to understand their actions without reference to masters’ strategies and the economic, social, and political structure in which both groups worked and lived.
The initial historiographical essay is more than a “highly selective” review of literature, as the author claims. It is really a piece of intellectual history that explains how research in the field has been informed by national and international debates, and how the existing literature reflects the tense coexistence and increasing confluence of two distinct scholarly traditions: that of Brazilian scholars and that of Brazilianists, a term that mainly designates U.S. students of Brazil. The confluence becomes apparent in several passages in the book. The study of the Brazilian slave family, for example, has been “stimulated to some extent by the debate over the black family in the United States” (p. 138), whereas Schwartz’s own study of the interaction between slavery and peasantry addresses theoretical debates previously developed by Brazilian scholars.
The second essay, “Sugar Plantation Labor and Slave Life,” reintroduces some of the central themes of Schwartz’s seminal Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985); namely, the centrality of the concept of work in understanding slaves’ lives, and the way slaves and masters manipulated the realities of plantation labor for their own interests. The petition of the rebellious slaves of one engenho provides an excellent view of the priorities and aspirations of the slaves themselves—the sort of material that is usually difficult to obtain by students of Latin American slavery. Regardless of how typical this episode may be, it represents a superb example of the slaves’ search for autonomy.
By studying the relationship between slavery and the Brazilian economy at large at the end of the eighteenth century, the author challenges the traditional notion that slave and peasant economies were totally disconnected entities in the colonial world. By focusing on the export capacity of the colonial territories, historians have constructed a vision of the colonial world that is ultimately Eurocentric in its purpose and underlying concerns. Schwartz, by contrast, argues that it is necessary to study the internal evolution of the colonies and the “complex, multidimensional, and historically changing relationship” between peasant and slave production (p. 66). Each region responded to the expansion of the internal market and the rising demand for foodstuffs in different ways, but the interaction between those peasant and slave sectors was apparent everywhere.
Regionally differentiated responses are an issue that also appears in the last two essays of the book, the first of which is devoted to the study of slave resistance and the famous quilombo of Palmares. Marronage and slave resistance have been widely researched for Brazil—as well as for other slave societies—but the author underlines some of the insufficiencies of this literature, the new research possibilities opened up by the development of African history, and the need to study questions like the “ethnic solidarities, political goals, and strategies” of the maroons themselves (p. 104). The final essay deals with slave godparentage as a means to understand slave families and their adaptation to the surrounding environment, as well as a way to test masters’ paternalism with regard to their bondsmen. Comparing his own findings with those of other researchers, Schwartz shows the persistence of certain patterns in ritual godparentage and the minimal role masters played as godparents of their slaves.
The literature on Brazilian slavery has grown so much in the past few decades that it has become the privileged province of a handful of specialists. The centrality of slavery to Brazilian history and the supposed—but increasingly challenged—“uniqueness” of post-emancipation race relations in that country lie behind such scholarly interest. This book reflects the continued importance of these issues, but it also serves as an excellent introduction to one of the liveliest fields of historical research in Latin America.
