Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840 (review)

Readers expecting a detailed account of the dramatic events of the Cabanagem, the violent Amazonian rebellion that roiled the province of Pará between 1835 and 1840, will wait until the final two chapters of this substantial new study. Even the longer periodization explicit in the title only hints at the full sweep of Harris's inquiry. For most of the book, he lingers in the second half of the eighteenth century, frequently glancing back even further. This approach allows him to reconstruct the "ways of life" of the "old" Amazon, which the rebellion's repression, he argues, all but brought to an end. The defeat by expeditionary forces sent from Rio de Janeiro, clinched by an amnesty, compelled the regional elite to bow to a centralizing state in a pact that undermined the traditional autonomy of the peasantry. A "new" Amazon soon took shape, built on the profits of rubber, the infrastructure it supported, and the immigrants it attracted. Although peasants managed to reassert control over their own labor amid the subsequent export boom, the rebellion's reversals irrevocably pushed them off desirable agricultural lands and secured their political subordination.

The Cabanagem finds its way into most accounts of post-independence Brazil as one of a series of regional revolts that erupted after Pedro I begrudgingly left for Portugal in 1831, leaving the young nation in the hands of a regency government. Regional elites vied over who would influence that government and what sort of government it would be. Effective state consolidation occurred only after 1840, when the teenaged Pedro II assumed the throne. Historians have emphasized the elite origins of the Cabanagem, focusing on Belém, the region's largest city, where monarchists and republicans competed for dominance amid rising hatred for Portuguese-born merchants. In traditional accounts, this factionalism unleashed the fury of the laboring classes, mostly Indians, who meted out vengeance in a race war against whites. Violence spread upriver as the repression pushed the rebels into the interior. One historian in the late nineteenth century placed the death toll at 30,000, a quarter of Pará's population, a figure that scholars have repeated but which cannot be verified through existing sources.

Harris, an anthropologist by training, revises this standard narrative in what he describes as a historical ethnography, based both on prodigious work in the archives and fieldwork among the region's peasants. He wants readers to place events in a broader context extending beyond Brazil to contemporaneous Spanish American uprisings by peasants protecting their livelihoods, families, and communities from the encroachments of capitalism. This comparative perspective is not as fully rendered as the introduction and conclusion would suggest. Thoroughly supported is his insistence that peasants were integral to the rebellion from its outset and that they comprised a decidedly rural and riverine population whose collective vitality scholars have underestimated. Characterizing them as Indian egregiously oversimplifies. Predominantly native peoples but also poor whites, mestizos, and free peoples of African descent, Amazonian peasants were as ethnically diverse as their economic activities were varied. They worked as subsistence farmers, hunters, fishermen, boatmen, soldiers, traders, and day laborers. Any adequate understanding of their aspirations and allegiances must account for the multiple identities these origins and occupations engendered. Indians themselves could be either tribal peoples like the Mundurucu, whose power expanded during the eighteenth century at the expense of other groups, or the more numerous individuals who had long since been shorn of or willingly relinquished tribal affiliations as a consequence of their interactions with the colonial world of Jesuit missions and, later, state-administered villages. Deeply sensitive to such complexity, Harris finds that "there were divided and mixed-up loyalties rather than a chasm in between the colonizers and the colonized" (p. 165). The Cabanagem, he concludes, did not begin as a caste or race war; it became one...