A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (review)

As the two largest black slaveholding societies in the nineteenth century world, the antebellum United States and the Brazilian Empire have long invited rich scholarship on the comparative history of slavery. Only recently, however, have historians begun to examine the direct economic, ideological, and cultural links between the two countries. With A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks, Laura Jarnagin adds to this growing body of work that seeks to extend the classical notion of a colonial Atlantic World both deeper into the nineteenth century, and farther south into Latin America. In her view, the post-Civil War migration of ex-Confederate elites to Brazil was not a mere “historical curiosity,” but an illuminating development in the history of Atlantic world capitalism (p. 1).

If Jarnagin’s insistence on an Atlantic frame of analysis fits in smoothly with current tendencies in historical scholarship, the substance of her interpretation does not. Unlike much recent work that has understood U.S. Southern elites as part of a wider hemispheric community of slaveholders—and, indeed, older research on Confederate movement to Latin America, which emphasized Civil War defeat and white supremacy as the primary motivations behind Southern migration—Jarnagin does not focus on slavery or racial politics. Instead, she sees Confederate migration to Brazil in the 1860s as the “logical historical outcome” of an extensive set of familial, economic, and cultural relationships between groups of elite merchants in both hemispheres (p. 203). Her careful study of these relationships adds a dimension to our understanding of eventual elite Southern migration, while contributing, at the same time, to the larger history of merchant capitalism in the early nineteenth century.

Jarnagin’s most impressive accomplishment is her reconstruction of the connections between two specific merchant groups interested in Brazilian–American commerce: the Dabney-Avelar Broteros family, in the United States, the Azores, and Brazil, and the House of Maxwell, Wright, & Co., a Baltimore-based and Rio de Janeiro–based trading firm. Her thorough genealogical research illuminates the wide-ranging kinship and marriage ties—individually insignificant, but profound in the aggregate—between these and other major players in Brazilian– American trade. Liberal politics, practical experience, and family bonds helped ensure the continuing predominance of these merchant families, who also shared important links to prominent Confederate migrants after the Civil War.

The book would have been considerably stronger, however, had it grappled directly with the politics of slavery. Jarnagin’s pages are dense with evidence that Confederate elites saw the demise of black bondage—and the “damnable abolition spirit of the age,” as one migrant put it—as a major reason for emigrating (p. 40). The attractions of Brazil’s own slaveholding society were obvious to them, if not always to Jarnagin herself. Instead, she limits herself to the observation that Southern elites sought “a community of individuals with a common set of values and aspirations” (p. 43). But what were those values, and how did those aspirations manifest themselves? Two brief paragraphs on the inducements of Brazilian slavery do not seem sufficient. Among the confluence of networks that brought two thousand elite southerners to Brazil the aftermath of Confederate defeat, surely one of the most significant was the shared commitment to slave labor.