Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (review)

Antonio José Dutra was a barber in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the 19^th century, and perhaps a typical one: like many other barbers of his day, he also pulled teeth, set bones and applied leeches. Furthermore, he owned a band famous throughout the city; his post mortem inventory lists trumpets, clarinets, drums and a significant income derived from such activity. Besides musical instruments and two houses, when he died in 1849, the African-born Dutra, a former slave, had thirteen slaves of his own, six of which he freed upon his death. Dutra's trajectory is the window through which Zephyr Frank leads us to the world of middling wealthholders in 19^th-century Rio de Janeiro, the former slaves among them in particular.

The thrust of Frank's argument is that slaveholding constituted the most feasible avenue to social mobility in the decades immediately following Brazilian Independence. Drawing on the careful analysis of a sample of more than one thousand estate inventories, he shows that slavery permeated all ranks of society and that slaves were the most equally distributed of assets. The institution of slavery was truly ubiquitous in the life of the capital: slaves comprised nearly half of the population, and nearly all wealthholders participated in slaveholding (according to inheritance records, 88 percent of wealthholders owned slaves). To be sure, slavery was far more important for the middling sectors of society than for their wealthy counterparts. Acquiring slaves was a more realistic goal for people of middling wealth, for the intensity of the African trade kept prices low until the early 1850s; wealthier investors tended to move increasingly toward rental real estate, thus avoiding the costs and hazards of slave property (slave resistance, diseases, housing costs).

Frank's data on wealthholding and its changes in 19^th-century Rio are surely a major and lasting contribution to the economic and social history of the city. They place in context and enhance our understanding of the perspective of someone like Dutra, otherwise a disconcerting historical character who moved, seemingly unabashed, from being an African slave to becoming an owner of slaves. The rich primary sources used in the text and the analysis offered by Frank invite further speculation on the historical motives and constraints of Antonio Dutra and his ilk. Dutra sought and achieved social mobility during a period in which the alternatives to it for someone like him may have looked truly appalling. In the 1830s and 1840s, more than ever before, the practice of illegal enslavement was widespread in Brazil. Not only did slaveholding permeate all ranks of society, but holding slaves illegally became a generally accepted practice after the law that formally abolished the African trade in 1831. These were dangerous times for freed people, Africans in particular. If Dutra had not achieved social mobility—that is, had he not been able to become an owner of slaves- he might have lived under the constant threat of reenslavement, or under the risk of being deemed a vagrant, thus incarcerated and sent to forced labor in public works, deported, or recruited.

Another strength of the book is its account of the economic changes that happened after the 1850s and how they affected the experience of middling wealthholders. The rise in slave prices and the changing economic environment in the period made difficult to realize the trajectory to social mobility that had been available for someone like Dutra. In the more complex and sophisticated economic milieu of the second half of the 19^th century, slaves and residential housing declined as forms of wealth accumulation, while the richest and ablest investors turned heavily toward railroad and government bonds and other credit assets. The materials presented by the author are relevant beyond the experience of middling wealthholders. One remembers Machado de Assis's rendering of the economic profile of Bentinho's family in Dom Casmurro...