Palmares, the largest and longest-lived maroon community in Brazil, survived for about a century, and although long mostly ignored by that nation's historians, it became in the twentieth century not only a subject of historical interest but a symbol of heroic resistance against slavery and of the importance and persistence of African culture in Brazil. Celebrated in statues, carnival floats, feature films, and novels, the death in 1695 of Zumbi, Palmares's last leader, has been commemorated in Brazil each November 20 since 1978 as the Day of Black Consciousness, an event memorialized by some states and about a thousand cities but still not a national holiday.This book, by one of Brazil's leading historians of slavery, presents a judicious summary and penetrating critique of the history and historiography of Palmares, as well as a detailed discussion of the principal documentary sources for its history. It is also a challenging reproach to much of the simplistic memorialization of Palmares as a singular example of persistent and successful slave resistance. Although Silvia Hunold Lara describes the early history of the numerous mocambos (fugitive settlements) that composed Palmares, and she discusses the many Portuguese and Dutch military campaigns against the fugitive communities as well as their effective defense, this volume concentrates on the years after 1678 and the fact that for a short time Gana Zumba, the ruler of Palmares, having suffered considerable losses from colonial expeditions, concluded an agreement in that year with the governor of Pernambuco in which he recognized Portuguese royal sovereignty, agreed to resettle in a small frontier town (Cucaú), accepted baptism, and promised to return new runaway slaves in return for recognition of his family's freedom and that of his followers and their children born outside the slave regime. Lara stresses that this was an episode that recalled other colonial fugitive hostilities and negotiated arrangements, including those made with the Jamaica and Guiana Maroons or with the cimarrones in Esmeraldas (Ecuador), San Lorenzo de los Negros (Veracruz), and other places in Spanish America.Such comparisons have rarely been made about Palmares, and Lara's emphasis on the failed attempt at negotiation may make some of the advocates of the heroic image uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she has now placed Palmares firmly within the broader context of the African American experience throughout the Americas. Moreover, Lara tells this complex story in careful detail by concentrating on the end of the seventeenth century, when the documentation of the peace negotiation, its breakdown, and the final battles provides historians with a knowledge of a Central African–style royal lineage that linked the various mocambos into what appears to be a neo-African kingdom of Palmares, a polity like the kingdom of Matamba that the Portuguese in Angola in this period referred to as a reino e kilombo and with which they often maintained diplomatic and commercial relations. Thus, not only has Lara placed Palmares into a broader African American context and provided details about the personalities and decisions of its leaders in its last decades, but she has also questioned the supposed intractability of the Portuguese colonial regime when confronted with slave resistance, and she demonstrates its willingness to deal with the rebel leadership much as it had with contemporary African polities when doing so seemed advantageous.The governor of Pernambuco hoped to turn the resettled maroons into compliant subjects and their community into something like the missionary-controlled Indigenous villages (aldeias) of colonial Brazil. This arrangement broke down quickly because of opposition from the slave-owning settler colonists and from a more radical element among the palmaristas led by Zumbi who refused to join the negotiation, perhaps because, as a later governor of Pernambuco suggested, many of them were former slaves who would have been forced back into servitude by the Cucaú agreement. The campaigns against them and their resistance under Zumbi continued for another 15 years, and even after that, remnant mocambos continued to form in the region.The author's impeccable scholarship and mastery of the existing sources has produced a book that is original in its approach, meticulous in its documentary basis, and suggestive in its discussion of the numerous still-unresolved questions about the origins, size, ethnic composition, leadership, language, and cultural continuity of Palmares. Like much of the best current Brazilian scholarship about slavery, noticeable throughout the book is a familiarity with, and incorporation of, the recent historiography on West Central Africa as well as with the ongoing debates about creolization versus African cultural continuities in Atlantic slave societies. Lara is also particularly effective in pointing out that Palmares, which as a polity survived for about a century, had a history of change over time. Through an imaginative use of maps that depict the changing dimensions of Palmares, she discusses how territorial, demographic, and political changes influenced both the internal strategies of its leaders and the willingness of colonial governors to seek political or military solutions to the challenge of slave resistance. This fundamental study will become a cornerstone for all future work on Palmares.