Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery.

In these five essays Stuart Schwartz brings together primary materials and synthesized secondary studies to re-examine several of the major problematics of Colonial Brazilian History, with special reference to slavery. Although four of the five chapters include portions of previously published articles or sections of Schwartz's last book, the resulting scholarship is nevertheless satisfying in its greater maturity and theoretical, comparative, geographic and temporal breadth. In addition, while this book cannot compete in significance with Schwartz's prize-winning and monumental Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (1985), it is substantially more accessible for students and scholars interested in comparative slavery, rather than Brazil per se.

Schwartz's analysis proceeds from two perspectives: 1) the ways in which Brazilian society and economy were influenced by the presence of slavery (escravismo) and 2) the lives of the slaves and their roles in shaping their own lives (escravidao). In practice these two perspectives informed each other as, for example, in the character of plantation labor. On the one hand Schwartz states categorically that "... coerced work for others oriented virtually every aspect of |the slaves'~ situation" and, on the other, that--in order to obtain the quality and quantity of labor necessary--the planters created "... incentives that would elicit cooperation ...". These incentives could be and were manipulated by the slaves to increase the areas of freedom in their lives, provide them and their families with more food and a better living situation, and facilitate manumission.

The first essay "Recent Trends in the Study of Brazilian Slavery" is very little changed from that published in 1988 in the Luso-Brazilian Review. It is a useful discussion of historiography from the 1930s to the present in Brazil and the U.S., and also brings in comparative perspectives. "Sugar Plantation Labor and Slave Life" (chapter two) is largely drawn from Schwartz's 1985 book and reaffirms his view that work was the most important determinant of a slave society.

Chapter Three, "Peasants and Slavery: Feeding Brazil in the Late Colonial Period" is, in my opinion, the most important contribution of the book. It is an original essay which examines the "specific historical processes in which the relations between slavery and peasantry were formed" and analyzes the "internal development" of colonial Brazil and "the social relations of production in the nonslave sectors of the economy, especially among |the~ peasantry". While historians have mostly focused on the export orientation of the colonial Brazilian economy and many scholars have followed Celso Furtado's interpretation of the absence of "backward linkages" in the Northeastern economy, Schwartz concludes in this essay that "... provisioning and export agriculture, were intimately related in a complex, multidimensional, and historically changing relationship. They were, in effect, two faces of the same coin". Schwartz argues that both the free rural population and the populations of the urban centers were growing in the eighteenth century, during a period of export contraction. This allowed the expansion of the peasant sector of subsistence agriculture which was increasingly organized for sale. The subsequent expansion of the export sector had a further stimulating effect on the production of foodstuffs for sale. Schwartz suggests that the focus of peasant producers on market sales also encouraged the use of slave labor in small-scale agriculture, implying that "... slavery was becoming a more widely diffused institution in the late colonial period than it had ever been." "The experience of late colonial and early national Brazil demonstrates the continuing power of slavery to determine all aspects of the economy and to penetrate into sectors not previously characterized by slave labor". This chapter is significant because of the argument that production of foodstuffs functioned as a stimulus to economic growth in the Brazilian Northeast in the colonial period. A subsidiary theme relates growth of the peasant population with increased production of foodstuffs. With this new analysis Schwartz emphatically contests the whole enclave economy thesis. The chapter also discusses Brazilian and American studies for all of Brazil (not just the Northeast) which concern the history of market-oriented subsistence agriculture. The one important omission that I know about is Bert Barickman's important dissertation, "The Slave Economy of Nineteenth Century Bahia: Export Agriculture and Local Market in the Reconcavo, 1780-1860" (University of Illinois at Urbana, 1991).

Chapter Four, "Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil" includes portions of Schwartz's 1970 JSH article, but goes far beyond it both in interpretation and in including the results of recent Brazilian studies on slave resistance. Most innovative is his discussion of Palmares itself, in which--primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence--Schwartz argues that "there is enough evidence to suggest that the introduction of the term quilombo into Brazil in the late seventeenth century was not accidental and that it represented more than simply a linguistic borrowing. If true, then we must deal with the African aspects of Palmares not as 'survivals' disembodied from their original cultural milieu, but |as~ a far more dynamic and perhaps intentional use of an African institution that had been specifically designed to create a community among peoples of disparate origins and to provide an effective military organization". Chapter Five, "Opening the Family Circle: Godparentage in Brazilian Slavery" represents an expansion of Schwartz's earlier work on godparentage in the Bahian Reconcavo in the eighteenth century. In this study Schwartz compares his earlier data with baptism data from Curitiba, Parana from 1680-1850, and with census and baptism data from Santiago de Iguape, Bahia in 1835. Overall Schwartz discovers that masters almost never served as godparents to slaves, but that the majority of slaves had free godparents. The 1835 data indicated a higher proportion of slave godparents than was true earlier, which Schwartz speculated indicated "... a growing sense of community among the slave population and a decreasing sense of dependency ...".

Schwartz's conclusion to his comparative study of godparentage also provides an appropriate summary for the book. Schwartz argues that "this discussion of godparentage suggests that a separation of the study of the inner workings of the slave community, (escravidao) and of slavery as an economic and social system (escravismo) is misguided. The formation of compadrio relations at the heart of family and spiritual life, like all else within slavery, reflected the essential relations of power within society and economy as a whole".

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof Universityt of Kansas