Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860

Preface

Little did I think when I received a summer’s grant for curriculum development from Global Education Associates’ World Order Program that it would eventually lead to a book. The idea was to prepare an undergraduate course that would draw attention to the troubling issues facing the modern world regarding food and its inequitable distribution. As a historian I wanted to explore this question into the past, and as a teacher I wanted to engage my students. I began the course with readings about the present, from protein complementarity to infant mortality, and then moved backward in time, discussing land reform, export economies, and cultural differences, arriving finally at the “conquest” of America, the Columbian exchange, and the Atlantic slave trade as we searched for immediate and long-term causes. I hope my students found this as challenging as did I. Those were the early beginnings of this very different book about food, its producers, its traders, and its meanings. By luck, I was in the city of Salvador the next summer, on my way to visit my sister in the interior, and decided to revisit a couple of archives. At the city archive, to my amazement, I found the late eighteenth-century manuscript records of licenses granted to street vendors, grocers, butchers, and boatmen, with the names of ordinary people pursuing their business—names that are normally inaccessible to historians. I then learned that at the Bahia state archive a project was underway to prepare a computerized index of postmortem estate inventories. When I presented a short list of names of vendors and shopkeepers, I was surprised to find that some 10 percent of them turned up as principals in these records. Excited by the possibilities, I returned to the University of Texas at Austin at the end of the summer with a new project in mind for further research. There have been many detours on the journey from those revelatory archival moments to the present book, but they have all offered me the pleasure not only of discovering lives of long-ago people, but also of establishing connections with people alive today who helped me along the way. Archives are useless to the historian without archivists to make their holdings available. At the Bahia state archive I counted especially on the day-to-day assistance of D. Edy Alleluia and Sr. Daniel, who brought bundles and more bundles of documents Preface Graham-final.indb xiii Graham-final.indb xiii 6/30/10 10:31:40 AM 6/30/10 10:31:40 AM xiv feeding the city to the reading room. Mercedes (Mercedinha) Guerra used computer data that she was compiling at that very time to search for the evergrowing lists of names I presented to her, and D. Judite was the key to the separate division housing estate inventories. The director of the archive, Anna Amélia Vieira Nascimento, added to her efficient administration the excited interest of a fellow historian. At the city archive I was greatly helped by Sr. Felisberto. Neusa Esteves shared her archival knowledge at the Santa Casa de Misericórdia. In the many divisions of the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro I have consistently found the staff conscientious and ready to help. I have had the pleasure of seeing the archive move from the ancient building on the other side of the square to successively more spacious quarters, while the catalog, once held in two large cylindrical cabinets , has been transformed into a sophisticated online instrument. The staff’s workload has steadily increased as a transformed history profession turns out dozens of dedicated young researchers. Jaime Antunes da Silva has directed the institution with skill and insight, never forgetting its ultimate purpose to advance knowledge. In the reading room, Sátiro Ferreira Nunes makes the system work and willingly shares his knowledge of how the documents are organized. At the manuscript division in the National Library I was helped by Waldyr Cunha before his retirement and then by Sr. Raimundo. The library and archive of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, ably directed by the institute’s president, Arno Wehling, offers a quiet place to work as well as a magnificent view of Guanabara Bay. I always benefit from the friendly and effective presence there of librarian Maura Corrêa e Castro. I long envied Brazilian historians who can be in the classroom today and at an archive tomorrow. For me a visit to an archive meant funding for...