Roberto Saba's fine book addresses the relationship between slavery, emancipation, and capitalist development in the Western Hemisphere through a deep examination of US-Brazilian relations. A recurring question throughout the book asks how was it that slavery, an institution that endured for centuries and that prompted violent war in the United States, ended relatively quietly in Brazil? One answer is well known: modernizing planters pivoted to massive waves of immigrant labor. The other answer—and what is novel here—is that decades of US-Brazilian diplomacy and networking directly led to Brazil's transition from slavery to free labor. Saba uncovers a fascinating social network that brought together diplomats, planters, technological visionaries, antislavery crusaders, newspapermen, universities, missionaries, and rebels, who observed and publicly debated the US example for the merits of enslaved versus free labor in the service of Brazil's economic modernization.
The central thread relates how Brazilians and US North Americans perceived one another vis-à-vis the issues of slavery and emancipation throughout the nineteenth century. Brazilians observed the US Civil War with great interest to understand what might await their nation should it press for an end to the enslavement of millions. Inevitable conflict? Ensuing prosperity? Fearing the first outcome, Brazilians adopted a conservative path toward emancipation that replaced enslaved laborers with immigrants while preserving the power and wealth of the planter class, in contrast to what occurred in the US South. Desiring the second outcome and taking the fates of North and South as object lessons in the toll of slavery on economic modernization and development, antislavery forces documented and trumpeted the prosperity of the free-labor North over the slave-labor South, as well as the vastly improved conditions of the postwar South under a free labor regime. Both cases supported the claims of the abolitionists: Brazil would prosper and modernize with free labor.
Much of the book deals with the Brazilian progressive and conservative responses to the US experience. For progressives, abolition meant the end of a shameful, degrading institution. For conservatives, abolition meant economic prosperity, mechanization, scientific agriculture, and dramatic growth. Progressives argued for immediate emancipation no matter the cost; conservatives argued for an emancipation process that protected elite wealth and power.
In the end, a conservative path was adopted, and emancipated slaves were replaced by free immigrant laborers. The big deception in all this discourse, for Saba, is that Brazilians never discussed what free labor would signify in a post-emancipation economy—a prosperous and industrious working class, or merely an answer to the problem of slavery? To the dismay of progressives, it was the latter. Free laborers were imported with such abundance as to depress wages and mire the new working class in poverty. The economies of scale of mechanized agricultural machinery reinforced the large landholdings that had been emblematic of the slave regime and created a new imperative for massive investment, putting agricultural production and prosperity beyond the reach of the rural proletariat.
The book delivers on its thesis that capital prevailed and that emancipation did not elevate the working class. What Saba posits as causal—a coordinated effort to preserve capitalist interests—seemed to me to be less back-room agreement to screw the little guy than the more casually brutal and indifferent assumption by elites that they deserved their privilege, coupled with a fundamental inability to imagine that the masses aspired to prosperous lives. No matter the intentionality, the outcome is equally damning.
On a final note, even though the book does not raise this question, it helps explain how the United States supplanted Europe as Brazil's major trading partner so quickly in the early twentieth century. Through Saba's research, we learn that what seemed like a radical change was really the culmination of over a half-century of economic and diplomatic ties—never before so clearly and convincingly laid out in the historiography.
