The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822-1888 by Ian Read (review)

Ian Read's book deals with slaveholding relationships in Santos, a port city in the province of São Paulo, between 1822 and 1888, and covers a chronological period that extends from the political emancipation of Brazil from Portugal up to the abolition of slavery.

Through an extensive compilation of demographic sources—hospital and cemetery records, letters of enfranchisement, population lists, fiscal movements, and criminal records—the author seeks to lay the foundation for his main argument that the conditions of slavery (health, treatment, food, and work) and opportunities beyond slavery (manumission and flight) were either more or less favorable, in the midst of an overall context of domination and violence, according to the social status of the masters. In other words, Ian Read tries to argue that slave relationships were affected by the socioeconomic variables that afflicted the owners or even further that "slavery in Santos was sufficiently hierarchical such that opportunities for slaves were open or closed depending on owner position and treatment" (3).

Behind this assertion, the author lends heavier weight to the structural aspects inherent to the slaveholding society at the same time that he moderates the value granted by more recent historiography to the spaces of autonomy and negotiation that the slaves relied on to alleviate the weight of domination. Agency, in this case, is subordinate to an external condition that patterns, nearly definitively, the result of these relations.

The method Read employs to develop his hypothesis is based on a quite original cross-checking of amalgamated data, originating from diverse sources and gathered into a common database. This strategy permits him to identify the personalities with whom he works—slaves and masters—at different times and positions on the checkerboard of Santos' social life; moreover, he can simultaneously accompany them through the temporal arc of more than seventy years. In this sense, the present book constitutes a solid work in social history with a basis in quantitative data.

Thus, another advance Read makes is to consider a relatively long period in the history of Santos, going beyond—within the chronological scope—the works with which he dialogues and which are concentrated in the second half of the nineteenth century, more specifically, in the final decades of the Empire. This option by the author makes possible a more panoramic view of the trajectory of Santos, punctuating the economic and urban changes that the city underwent during this long period, to become—due to its port—the most outstanding hub for the transit of immigrants, merchandise, and resources in the province. The heightened status of Santos vis-à-vis the economic axis of the province of São Paulo, and generally with the rest of the Empire, imprinted alterations on the dynamics of slavery, which the author emphasizes with sufficient effectiveness based on the method employed.

The rather daring decision to launch into such dense demographic research is simultaneously the book's strong point and its Achilles' heel: first of all because despite considering it in his analysis, the author does not manage to bring to light, in the midst of the hodgepodge of characters presented and the places they transit, a convincing representation of the multiform chaotic scenario of Santos and its suburbs as the existing historiographical and memorial-like narratives prescribe. The image that Read depicts of the city offers an ordered panorama with respect to the hierarchical and geographical compartments that group slaves, masters, and free men, lending the impression of an exaggeratedly synchronous territory.

The outlines forged by the repertory of figures adduced by the author are not sustained without the inexorable presence, in this case, of the living material that makes up the hustle and bustle of the city. Except for the exceptions in the first chapter, where it paints individual trajectories of slaves and masters, and of the last, where it establishes an interesting typology of local abolitionists and slave owners, the characters...