Roberto Saba's new book offers a modernization saga integrating São Paulo province's more dynamic sectors with US Northern capitalists on a path that slowly converted Brazil from slavery to free labor during the second half of the nineteenth century. This capitalist odyssey started in the 1850s: US Northerners conceived of a mild transition for Brazil modeled on the acceptance of free labor and gradual emancipation. This proposal was unacceptable to leaders of the US Southern states, which seceded and fought a civil war to maintain slavery. On the Brazilian side, termination of Atlantic slave traffic made slavery's end inevitable. Some elites awakened to the need to adapt labor strategies in view of how a shortage of African slaves would negatively affect the imperial economy. As slave labor's political and social costs increased, more Brazilian elites looked to the US North for a strategy to increase productivity by growing entrepreneurship and spreading technical innovation. Their modernization efforts were rewarded in the late 1880s, when a broad abolitionist coalition ended slavery without major upheavals.The book's first part depicts US Southern slaveholders' failure to create a partnership with their Brazilian counterparts. By 1850, Brazil and the US South were the Western Hemisphere's two major independent slave societies, with a combined population of around six million enslaved people. Enslaved Africans and their descendants fueled both national economies, producing commodities for global markets and strengthening slaveholders' political position in their respective countries. A continental alliance might be expected from these convergent interests. US Secretary of State John C. Calhoun desired such a partnership, explaining in 1844 that “it is our policy to cultivate the most friendly relations with all the countries on this continent, and with none more than with Brazil” (p. 17). But in his well-researched evaluation of the correspondence produced by US diplomats serving in Rio de Janeiro, Saba shows that, despite the South's dominance in the US State Department, its partisans were incapable of creating a hemispheric alliance of slaveholders. Southern diplomats serving in Brazil during the 1840s and 1850s were too arrogant to establish a real partnership. They despised the empire's form of government and its racial mix, and publicly expressed a reckless imperialist impulse to annex the Amazon Basin. Ultimately, an alliance between slaveholding elites became impracticable. Deep, insightful research on US diplomatic dispatches shows that, after interacting with envoys like Matthew Fontaine Maury and politicians like Henry A. Wise, Brazilian elites lost hope in what the Confederacy could offer in terms of capital and expertise. Consequently, “Southern slaveholders . . . could not establish an effective foreign policy in defense of slavery” and “failed to convince” Brazilian slaveholders “to embark on a proslavery crusade” (pp. 18–19).After the debacle of the Confederacy, some 5,000 die-hard Southerners immigrated to Brazil, hoping to reestablish their slave society. One-third employed slaves on their farms. But the new settlers did not consider the transition taking place in the empire. By the time the Confederates had established themselves in Brazil, São Paulo's regional barons were coming to terms with the technological innovations taking place in the US North. The wealthy landowners were fascinated with the mechanization of agriculture, which promised improved land productivity despite slave labor's growing scarcity. Many of them would send their sons to study in the United States to learn new techniques and to gain entrepreneurial skills, thus increasing their commitment to develop modern work relationships under capitalist rules. Consequently, despite the Southerners' efforts to re-create a lost environment in the tropics, they ended up subsidizing Brazilian farmers with all kinds of professional expertise and enforcing coffee planters' modernization efforts.In the second part of the book Saba realizes an extensive and intensive archaeology of the era's political thought, recovering the opinions of both US travelers and Brazilian visitors from diaries, newspapers, letters, and published memoirs. His research shows that, by the 1870s, both groups agreed on the superiority of free labor over slave labor and the need to rapidly develop wage labor relationships in the empire. Saba, however, does not investigate how far such impressions were correct.Analyses connecting Brazil's antislavery turn with modernization are not new; they date from the 1960s, when pioneering works by Emília Viotti da Costa and Warren Dean pointed to Paulista capitalism as an alternative to the Brazilian/Northeast patriarchy. Saba's contribution lies in his emphasis on antislavery movements in the making of capitalism, as well as on reformers' lack of empathy for the formerly enslaved, who were incorporated as free and destitute laborers under the new order of things. The transition from slave to free labor had never been about creating an egalitarian society. Only a few abolitionists, such as André Rebouças and Andrew Jackson Lamoureux, denounced how postemancipation working relations affected dispossessed Brazilian workers.
Read full abstract
Jun 9, 2023
Andrew Tsz Wan Hung 
Open Access
