Roberto Saba’s American Mirror is an insightful examination of how abolition in both Brazil and the United States resulted not in more equitable societies, but, rather, in the expansion of capitalism under regimes of wage labor that intensified vast inequalities. Saba argues that cosmopolitan antislavery reformers promoted emancipation “to boost capitalist development in both countries” (2). These “bourgeois modernizers” saw slavery as “the main impediment” to modernity and capitalist development (3). Abolishing slavery would attract immigrant laborers, encourage innovation, and free up capital and labor in more rational ways. According to these reformers, slaveowners did not make good use of technology, did not innovate, wasted labor power, and maintained a colonial relationship with Great Britain. Saba contends that antislavery was not just about rights and freedom, but also about the making of capitalism: while rights would remain “distant aspirations,” “antislavery reformers succeeded in expanding capitalist production and trade” (7). Saba is not comparing and contrasting the United States and Brazil, but, instead, studying the shared process of capitalist development on a global scale (one of the book’s great strengths).
Saba’s provocative thesis builds on as well as upends the new historiography detailing slavery’s centrality to capitalism’s expansion, arguing that even more important was how the abolition of slavery, and the new labor and property regimes that emancipation engendered, created an even more powerful industrial and agro-industrial capitalist system. Saba argues that the clear economic superiority of the U.S. North in comparison with the U.S. South proved to nineteenth-century observers that slavery was an economic anchor. Furthermore, slavery’s abolition in both countries didn’t result in economic disruption (which one would have imagined if slavery was truly central to capitalism) but instead massive economic expansion (which was even more evident in Brazil as capitalist expansion was concentrated in the coffee-processing region around São Paulo, which had formerly relied on slavery).
Saba also challenges historians who see the U.S. South as having a successful proslavery foreign policy, especially in Brazil, the second largest slave power in the hemisphere. Saba argues that southerners largely failed to build a proslavery coalition with Brazil, as southern agents’ haughtiness and imperialistic attitudes antagonized Brazilians. Brazilians did not see themselves as natural allies with the slaveholding South, but, rather, the modern North. Brazilians made a careful comparison of the U.S. South and North and looked to the industrial and scientific advances of the North as their lodestar. American antislavery reformers returned the admiration, generally embracing Brazil’s conservative and slow moves toward abolition, “a process of conservative modernization” that they applauded (95). After Brazilian emancipation, North American technology, farming methods, medicine, and schools were all put to service the interests of the local elite and general capitalist expansion. However, Saba contends this was not due to U.S. imperialism, but instead led by the fazendeiros (the Brazilian coffee elites). Saba likewise shows how influence flowed multidirectionally, as North Americans also learned in Brazil capitalistic techniques that helped them conquer the global market. For example, the machine manufacturer William Van Vleck Lidgerwood’s experience making coffee-processing machinery in Brazil turned him into a global manufacturer based in London. In sum, coffee fazendeiros and U.S. capitalists succeeded in managing abolition while staving off more far-reaching reforms, creating a free wage labor system that resulted in booming production and massive inequality.
This book is about a small group of capitalists in both societies, yet Saba pushes his argument concerning how emancipation was not really about freedom but about promoting capitalism much beyond these men to make claims the evidence does not support: “After all, for most antislavery reformers, the transition from slave to free labor had never been about creating an egalitarian society” (220). The only ways this sentence is true is if you exclude thousands upon thousands of people of African descent, the freedpeople themselves (and some whites), in both the United States and Brazil, from the category of “antislavery reformers.” Saba focuses on law students, urban professionals, and spiritualists when discussing Brazilian abolition movements, not Afro-Brazilian efforts, to make his argument that abolitionists sought a smooth transition to capitalist wage labor. Likewise, he focuses on men in the United States who were hardly central leaders in the abolitionist movements, and merely held abolitionist sympathies. Many abolitionists in the United States, especially Black abolitionists, were primarily concerned with creating a more egalitarian society. Saba does not distinguish enough between men who merely held abolitionist sympathies and those who were actually important abolitionist activists. Therefore, it is not surprising that the former were unabashedly pro-capitalist, while the latter often had a more emancipatory vision.
“The most consequential legacy of antislavery in the western hemisphere,” Saba writes, “was an economic order based on the exploitation of wage earners” (7). This formulation ignores the millions of enslaved men and women who struggled and fought for freedom. The most consequential legacy was legal freedom for enslaved peoples, and in many areas, access to basic rights (Brazil and the United States look the worse in this scenario, compared to Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, or Cuba). While for Saba these struggles might only have resulted in slavery being replaced by degraded wage labor, that was not how the freedpeople themselves imagined their accomplishments. In this book, popular actors—slaves, freedpeople, and immigrant workers—are often only acted upon, with no agency or voice.
If you accept the book is about a fairly small but powerful group of U.S. and Brazilian businessmen and politicians (a laudable and necessary project), then this is not a problem, although it does suggest their influence is not quite as overarching (or uncontested) as Saba insists. Saba’s overreach should not, however, detract from American Mirror’s impressive strengths. The book is exhaustingly researched, with material from national and local archives in Brazil and the United States. Saba’s central argument, that many elite reformers chose capitalism over a more egalitarian post-emancipation society, is undoubtedly correct, as are his perceptive insights on the transformation of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
