Duke University Press
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  • A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860
A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860. By B. J. Barickman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xx, 276 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

The Portuguese settlers of sixteenth-century Brazil quickly discovered how eminently suited for sugarcane cultivation were the deep clay soils, mild temperatures, and well-distributed rainfall of the lands along the northern edge of the great bay behind the city of Salvador, Bahia. By the late eighteenth century the western reaches of the same bay led to the tobacco cultivating region around Cachoeira, with its sandier soil, while manioc plants flourished around the bay’s southwestern shores. These three areas were closely linked to each other and to the great market city at the mouth of the bay, from where ships sailed to Portugal with sugar or to Africa with tobacco and cane brandy. Slaving ships returned with their dreadful cargoes to be distributed, albeit unevenly, to all three bay-side areas. Manioc flour (cassava flour) supplied the bulk of the calories consumed by free and slave alike, most of it passing through the city’s centralized official market. [End Page 548]

Barickman’s fine book emphasizes two points: the close interconnectedness of these three economies (sugar, tobacco, and manioc flour) and their sharp differences. Too long, he says, have historians focused only on sugar or at most on sugar and tobacco as export crops, ignoring the importance of the domestic market for foodstuffs and portraying society as made up entirely of great planters and miserable slaves. The middling wealth of tobacco and manioc farmers and the active exchange that took place in Salvador have so far been virtually ignored. And it is meaningless to make much of a distinction between those masters who worked their manioc and tobacco fields alongside their two, three, or four slaves, and those who owned no slaves and have heretofore been referred to as peasants. On the other hand, the sugar planters, with their 100 to 400 slaves, obviously occupied a vastly different position in society and stood at a greater distance from their workers. When sugar prices went up—and the period examined in this book was one of sugar prosperity—sugar mills were built on lands previously used for tobacco and even manioc. But this development did not mean that manioc farmers were pushed onto unsuitable land or that the price of foodstuffs went up. Tobacco did suffer, but for entirely different reasons that were related to alterations in the pattern of international trade, most particularly the curtailment of the slave trade.

Chock-a-block with tables and figures and based on a thorough use of primary and secondary sources, this book will be consulted by all those interested in the economic and social history of the region or in the nature of colonial economies more generally. Barickman takes the reader into his confidence as he lays out each problem, examines the possible sources that might provide solutions, discusses the limitations encountered, and finally arrives at tentative answers. In doing so he challenges many accepted generalizations about Brazilian history, both minor and major. He sometimes employs the rhetorical approach of deliberately leading the reader down a false trail, as when he seems to challenge the notion that large sugar planters held on to vast estates by pointing to the practice of partible inheritance, only to conclude that one way or another such estates did indeed survive in the hands of a very few. He spends many pages criticizing those who point to the lack of an internal market as an obstacle to the full development of capitalism only to admit in one final sentence that, yes, it was unlikely that the internal market, given its limitations, “would bring about dynamic qualitative changes in the economy as a whole” (p. 70). He first presents a figure that seems to demonstrate a huge rise in the price of manioc meal only then to show us in a second one that if prices are corrected for overall inflation, virtually no increase occurred over a 70-year period, despite occasionally sharp fluctuations. Whether amused or irritated by these techniques, the reader cannot but be impressed by the depth of the author’s knowledge and the wealth of new insights he presents.

Richard Graham
University of Texas at Austin

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