The Tribute of Blood: Army, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864-1945 (review)

This innovative, insightful, but often frustrating book uses an apparently narrow topic—the transformation of military recruitment from impressment to conscription—to address a broad set of issues in Brazilian history: state-building, masculine honor, nationalism, race, and citizenship. The first section examines the practice of forced recruitment from the Paraguayan War (1864-1870) to 1905 and the 1874 conscription law's failure. A middle section profiles soldiers, presents a social history of enlisted service, and assesses the army's weight in social control by comparing it to the country's rudimentary prison system. The last section traces the passage of the 1908 obligatory military service law and its successful implementation after 1916, concluding with an assessment of conscription's significance through World War II, during which Brazil contributed a significant contingent to the Allied effort.

What interests Beattie are the social and cultural meanings of impressment and conscription, rather than institutional history or state-building as conventionally defined. Nineteenth-century impressment focused on the unprotected poor, criminals and vagrants, mostly non-whites, who served enlistments that, in practice, stretched for a decade or more; soldiers were, in consequence, seen as disreputable, dishonorable figures, part of the world of the "street," not the respectable "house." Beattie draws this insight from the anthropological work of DaMatta. ¹ After the dismal failure of the 1874 draft law, the early twentieth century saw a wholesale reorientation in popular and elite attitudes toward the army. Barracks evolved from being seen as disreputable places akin to bordellos to become homes for respectable male members of Brazilian families.

Beattie touches on numerous other important issues. He shows that the army's late nineteenth-century withdrawal from the business of managing prisons and handling criminals in its ranks reduced Brazil's penal capacity; the construction of civilian jails did not keep pace. The state's limited capacity for social control actually shrank during this period of rapid social, economic, and political change that saw the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the republic in 1889. Beattie skillfully traces the national patterns of recruitment and transfer of enlisted men from the Northeast to the South, the "troop trade" that prevailed during the late nineteenth century, exhorting historians of coercive labor regimes to pay attention to military service, perhaps the last legitimate form of forced labor. The fortuitous survival of 315 enlisted men's courts-martial from 1896 permits an analysis of formal discipline and army life during the twilight years of impressment (the picture is grim). The enormous variety of sources, including popular songs, parliamentary debates, memoirs, newspapers, cartoons, and even a 1917 army doctor's study of soldiers' tatoos (part of the eugenic interest in soldiers), reveal the centrality of recruitment to many Brazilians' understandings of their society and nation.

This book's strengths lie in the author's analysis of popular and elite discourse about impressment and conscription. He sensitively traces the assumptions about race, honor, family, gender, and nation that pervade it, matters to which historians, especially those of the military institutions in Latin America, have paid far too little attention. But this emphasis on discourse, especially prevalent in the last chapters of the book, comes at the expense of mundane matters that were at least as important to this historical change. Army spokesmen may have discursively "remodeled the barracks into a national house, an 'honorable' vessel that protected and developed national masculine virtue" in the 1910s and 1920s (264), but, surely, such propaganda was not credible without (among other things) the real bricks-and-mortar remodeling of soldiers' quarters that took place. Nevertheless, the 1920s barracks-construction program is only mentioned in photo captions (262, 265). More on the social history and institutional structures of the army from 1916 to 1945 would...