Mary Karasch has a knack for writing landmark books. Her Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton University Press, 1987) remains an indispensable work for scholars of the period during which slavery peaked in the Brazilian capital. She subsequently turned her attention to colonial Goiás, the vast interior captaincy that covers modern-day Goiás, Tocantins, the Distrito Federal (Brasília), and parts of adjacent states. The product of decades of research, Before Brasília is, like Slave Life, a thoroughly researched, comprehensive work; historians of Brazil's interior will rely on it for years to come.

Karasch admits in the introduction that no ‘one theory’ orients this book and that readers will instead discover ‘many interwoven strands’ as she examines the ‘central theme’: ‘the evolution of frontier violence and enslavement that ultimately led to the consolidation of white rule over a majority population of color, both free and enslaved’ (p. xxi). The brief conclusion reflects on central Brazil's frontiers and borderlands and Karasch argues that the ‘captaincy of Goiás clearly does not fit the old Turnerian vision of the frontier’ (p. 301), something of an understatement, given the extent to which scholarship has demonstrated that the North American West did not conform to Frederick Jackson Turner's view of the frontier as a cradle of democracy and a space of opportunity for all. Instead central Brazil

Before Brasília is not, however, organised as the history of a succession of frontiers, but as a chapter-by-chapter discussion of colonial Goiás's principal social groups: the indigenous nations, the invaders, the state and its men, the white property holders, African and crioulo slaves, the Church and the faithful, women, and free people of colour.

Paulista slave raiders’ bandeiras (expeditions) first reached Goiás in the 1590s and ranged widely during the seventeenth century; from the north, Jesuit-led entradas (also expeditions) sought indigenous peoples to convert to Christianity and to herd into mission villages (until 1759). While colonial governments nominally authorised some bandeiras, many more were informally organised by early colonists and or city councils and therefore left little documentation. In time, bandeirantes discovered the gold deposits that prompted the first Luso-Brazilian settlements in the 1720s. Expeditions to pacify indigenous peoples continued into the nineteenth century, long after what is normally considered the end of the bandeira era. In a fascinating chapter, Karasch analyses indigenous practices of warfare and peace-making and characterises central-Brazilian warfare as ‘episodic, interrupted by periods of peace that usually did not last long’ (p. 125). Indigenous nations’ martial ability enabled many to survive and even to contest Portuguese hegemony, while others negotiated for peace and accepted ‘a vassalage relationship to the distant crown’ (p. 126). Far from effectively pacifying Goiás, missions offered few attractions to indigenous peoples and, concludes Karasch based on Raimundo José da Cunha Matos's early nineteenth-century observations, ‘any nation that spent time in a mission, such as the Xavante and the Kayapó, emerged from the experience embittered and ready for war’ (pp. 245–6).

Subject to São Paulo until 1748, Goiás became a separate captaincy when the crown determined that its gold mines were sufficiently rich that a more effective state presence was needed to collect the royal fifth. By the 1770s, Goiás was the fifth-wealthiest captaincy in Portuguese America (p. 131), but gold production declined steadily thereafter; the mining centres dwindled into sleepy villages or even ghost towns. As elsewhere, government efforts to establish ‘good order’ ran afoul of ‘recalcitrant locals of all colors and ethnicities’; members of the white elite failed to ‘deliver fortunes in gold to Lisbon’ (pp. 156–7) but used state institutions like the militia, the municipal councils, the Church, and administrative bodies to cement their position. As the mines declined, miners and their descendants shifted into agriculture and ranching.

African slaves and their descendants (slave, freed, and freed) were essential to Portuguese colonialism; they did most of the mine and farm work and much of the fighting against indigenous peoples, a role eventually institutionalised in the segregated militia, about which Karasch presents much detail. As in other mining regions, African men predominated among the gold production work force. A few fugitive slaves even discovered gold fields that others appropriated (p. 189). As the mines declined, so did the African proportion among the enslaved, who were increasingly creole and mixed-race. By 1832, free and freed people of colour constituted some two-thirds of the 68,497 people whom census takers enumerated; there were just over 13,000 slaves and almost 12,000 whites, while mission Indians numbered less than 1,000.

Remarkable anecdotes enliven Before Brasília. A governor committed suicide when his parda (mixed-race) mistress, daughter of a carpenter, insisted that she marry him (pp. 131, 254–5). A formidable Kayapó woman, Damiana da Cunha, led bandeiras in the early nineteenth century to bring her compatriots into aldéias (secularised missions) (pp. 86–9). The photographs of indigenous artefacts collected by Johan Emanuel Pohl during his travels through Goiás in the late 1810s (now housed in a Vienna museum) provide a compelling link to the people about whom Karasch writes. Appendices present invaluable data, including the names of the region's indigenous nations, summary results of all of the region's censuses (taken between 1779 and 1832), and a list of churches and lay brotherhoods. Karasch's descriptions of geography, trade routes, indigenous nations, and documentation of the known bandeiras and entradas will be invaluable references for future scholars. The book's title, however, is a bit misleading, for Karasch ends in the 1830s and does not address the more than a century between then and the Brazilian capital's relocation.