In Memory of B. J. Barickman: Historian, Teacher, Mentor

On Saturday, November 12, 2016, the brilliant historian of Brazil B. J. Barickman died at his home in Tucson, Arizona.

He was born in Champaign, Illinois, on September 9, 1958. In 1977, Bert began his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a B.A. cum laude in History in 1981. His curiosity about the world outside the United States, and about Latin America in particular, took him to Brazil and Argentina as a young man. During the academic year 1981–82, he attended the Masters program in History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and in 1983 he completed a summer program on the social and political history of the Southern Cone at the Universidad de Belgrano, in Argentina. Through these travel and study experiences, Bert was able to become fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish. In time, his proficiency in the Portuguese language became legendary in Brazil and in the United States, not only because of his ability to speak even better than many native speakers but also because of his superb writing skills. He completed his graduate work in History at the University of Illinois, where he earned a doctoral degree under the direction of Joseph Love in 1991.

In 1990, Bert became assistant professor of Latin American History at the University of Arizona—his home institution until his untimely death and the place from where he produced his influential and innovative scholarly work. His research on slavery, plantation life, and the economy of the Bahian Recôncavo during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has transformed our understanding of the slave-based agriculture and the experience of enslavement in one of the oldest and most significant slaveholding regions in the Americas. His 1990 doctoral dissertation, revised and published in English in 1998 as A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 interrogated what until then had been accepted truths about the export economy, landholding structures, and slave relations in the region. The book called into question the "plantationist view" that insisted that monoculture, latifundia, and the use of slave labor only for the production of export crops were the mainstays of the colonial and imperial economies of Bahia. Instead, A Bahian Counterpoint made clear that the export economy of sugar and tobacco and the farming and marketing of subsistence crops, particularly cassava flour, were interdependent. In fact, the book demonstrated that what allowed the expansion of the sugar economy in Bahia was the manufacture of cassava flour and the cultivation of other subsistence crops in a variety of landholding arrangements and with the use of slave labor by sugar planters and small farmers alike. In this fine book, Bert broke new ground not only because he confronted the "plantationist perspective" on its home turf, but also because of the innovative use he made of a wide range of rare archival sources, including manuscript parish censuses and probate records.

In his meticulously-researched and skillfully-argued articles, Bert continued to problematize, interrogate, and challenge the historiographical consensus and common-sense assumptions on central aspects of the history of slavery, of the family, of household composition and headship, and of the economic roles of free women of color in Bahia. Thanks to his work, we now know that slaves in the sugar plantations and cane farms of the Recôncavo cultivated provision grounds, and in some cases, were able to develop economic units of their own. We also know that sugar planters and wealthy cane farmers in the region did not often head large, extended households of the type described by a long historiographical tradition that started with Giberto Freyre's 1933 seminal work Casa-grande e senzala. We also have Bert to thank for initiating a methodological reflection on the ways in which historians have interpreted the evidence presented in household censuses and for calling us to take into account the political concerns and ideological assumptions that informed the enumeration, classification and categorization of information by census-takers in late colonial and early nineteenth...