Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822-1889 (review)

Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822-1889. By JUDY BIEBER. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 253 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

This work examines the interrelationship of state centralization and municipal politics from the perspective of several peripheral municipalities in the province of Minas Gerais. Knitting together analysis of political culture with the operation of formal political institutions, it effectively engages current theoretical concerns in reconstructing political life in nineteenth-century Brazil. Focused on the geographically isolated sertão mineiro, the work explores the region's integration in the national political system and offers insight into the working of the imperial system as a whole.

By midcentury the creation of centralized political institutions had ended municipal autonomy and local leaders recognized the need to forge links with provincial and national authorities who made appointments and allocated funds. An important consequence of the shift was endemic violence and corruption in the electoral process. The author emphasizes that these were not a result of incapacity, isolation, or incompletely assimilated political values in the isolated sertão. It was a direct consequence of integration into a centralized political system in which elections had to be won to earn appointments and allotments of revenue, in which partisan manipulation of state institutions was carried out with impunity, and in which political outsiders facing opponents who controlled the state's institutions of social control resorted to private force to challenge them. Various electoral reforms failed to address these basic patterns.

The creation of a centralized political system was accompanied by a transition from kin-based, personalized politics to more formal bureaucratic and partisan alliances. In an excellent discussion of the meaning that party politics had in the sertão mineiro, especially for the municipal elite, the author emphasizes that after midcentury politics was not characterized by traditional personalism and strategic adoption of superficial party labels. Rather, while some instrumental motivations were real enough, understandings of politics were also changing. Over time, new political norms were consistently expressed, as political behavior came to be judged in terms of its consistency with liberal institutions. Politicians invested considerable time and resources in defending themselves or attacking their enemies in such terms. Party identities took on real importance, particularly by the 1860s, as they became entwined with notions of honor. Far from being conveniently adopted to correspond to cabinet changes, party loyalty was a crucial element of personal honor.

The author effectively draws on a range of documentation and offers considerable detail in covering three different municipios, reconstructing family networks, and presenting quantitative evidence on the increase of electoral crime after midcentury. Abundant use of official correspondence in particular gives a very human face to many individual stories that exemplify the work's broader issues.

The author argues that the rural periphery actively participated in the construction of political discourse and effectively illustrates changing conceptualizations of politics. (The discussion of the concept of honor in party identity will surely soon be cited soon by other researchers.) The author's strategy of "centering the municipio" in her analysis yields many results, and perhaps it is unfair to ask for more in a work that does so much, but the absence of policy debates that resonate at the national level is striking. Of course, the centralization of political institutions at the conclusion of the regency is crucial in setting the context for this story, and the author does examine various electoral reforms, but other policy debates, such as those over abolition, are given short shrift. Work such as this that insightfully reexamines political life from the periphery holds much promise; hopefully the view of the center of the political system will not be lost in the change of perspective.

This solid contribution to the historiography of the Brazilian empire will be required reading for specialists...