Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822-1889 (review)

Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822-1889. By Judy Bieber (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1999) 253 pp. $45.00.

Politico-institutional history of nineteenth-century Latin America is of interest to any scholar wishing to compare the emergence of nation-states in the former European colonies. The colonies of Spain and Portugal are notable because they gained independence early in the nineteenth century (except in the Caribbean), long before European imperialism met its death knell in Africa and Asia. Brazil is an excellent example. Alone among its Iberian counterparts, it became independent in 1822 under the rule of a monarch from the former mother country. For more than six decades thereafter, Brazilian planters and merchant elites supported monarchical rule, first by Dom Pedro I (1822-1831) and then by his son, Dom Pedro II (1840-1889).

Nineteenth-century Brazil has long been known as exceptional in Latin America for its political stability. While Spanish America fragmented into quarrelsome republics wracked by civil war, Portuguese America preserved its territorial integrity. Yet, behind this familiar story, the picture was far more complicated.

In this first-rate monograph, Bieber traces the political growth of a frontier region in Minas Gerais, one of the empires's most important provinces. Minas Gerais had emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the world's richest sources of gold and diamonds. The resulting economic boom quickly drew migrants from all over the empire. By the early nineteenth century, however, the mines had dried up, and the Minas Gerais economy became dependent on agriculture for the next two centuries.

Bieber's interest is in the political system that evolved on the margin of this important province. Her well-documented thesis is that the rigid boss rule thought to have been born with the Republic in 1889 was in full bloom as early as 1850. By focusing on the most local center of power, the município, the author gives a richly documented picture of the extreme partisanship that characterized every level of government. Most important, the contending factions constantly resorted to electoral fraud and unrestrained violence against their rivals.

Bieber's use of methodology is relatively conventional. She employs the techniques of demographic and economic history to reconstruct the material bases of the region. She then relies on constitutional history to trace the struggles between centralism and federalism. These methodologies enable her to exploit effectively the extensive local and regional archives.

By the end of the empire, politics amounted to more than merely clan conflict. Ideology won its place; the predominant variety was liberalism--an "elitist liberalism underlain by personalism and patronage" (159). Bieber shows that the path to modern electoral democracy in Brazil was far from smooth. In fact, some of the partisan conflict from the late empire looks disconcertingly familiar.

Thomas E. Skidmore
Brown University

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