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Reviewed by:
  • Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580–1822
  • Elizabeth A. Kuznesof
Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580–1822. By Alida C. Metcalf ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xxi plus 280 pp. $22.95).

First published in 1992 by the University of California Press, the republication of this fine study in paperback is good news for College teachers. While [End Page 276] it could have benefited from incorporation of the substantial scholarship of the last decade focusing on the history of the Brazilian family, slavery and the peasantry, the basic research stands up well. This book will be especially useful for graduate courses and even undergraduate seminars.

Alida Metcalf tells the story of "how families survived in the world of colonial Brazil" (p. 1) based on the experiences of the slaves and small farmers of Santana de Parnaiba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She argues that family strategies were critical to the successful colonization of the Brazilian frontier and also are the key to understanding the origins of social stratification. The town of Santana de Parnaiba began as a part of the frontier; community members "transformed land into private property and Indians into personal slaves" (66) and thus originated the hierarchical social order that became characteristic of Parnaiba. Although Indian slavery was not legal, Indian slaves or "administrados" were nevertheless included in wills as part of inheritance until 1758. The frontier provided the resources that allowed a small elite to form and to become wealthy and powerful in a town such as Santana de Parnaiba. (4). Thus Metcalf argues that the way the Brazilian frontier developed is one of the roots of inequality in Brazilian society and continues to this day. (5)

The book is based on a substantial body of primary documentation: manuscript censuses for 1775, 1798 and 1820, parish records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, property inventories and wills over a two hundred year period, and town council records including registration of slave manumissions. Metcalf utilized both qualitative and quantitative analysis to reconstruct the life of the community over time in terms of the family and class. Metcalf devoted a chapter each to Planter Families, Peasant Families and Slave Families, analyzing the household economy, family strategies and dynamics of each of these population groups. The groups were differentiated by means of production—including ownership of land and/or slaves, and relationship to the market—as well as legal status. This approach was made especially effective by following individual households in each category through a series of censuses. The methodology is discussed in a useful appendix. The text is organized in six chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion.

Metcalf's most important argument stipulates that the planter class maintained itself through inheritance strategies that privileged one heir—usually a daughter and son-in-law—to succeed the parents in Parnaiba. Portuguese inheritance law specifically made all legitimate children equal heirs, regardless of gender or order of birth. Nevertheless Metcalf argues that differences were made through judicious use of the dowry, the disposition of the "third" of the estate not automatically distributed to the heirs, and private agreements among heirs to sell their portions to the chosen sibling. Metcalf reached this conclusion after studying the number of slaves owned by a family, how these were distributed in dowries and inheritance received and then in several succeeding censuses. She found that over time slaves and other property were unequally held by heirs, and that often the more fortunate stayed in Parnaiba while siblings migrated. One problem with this analysis is that it neglects wealth brought in by the marriage dowries of wives of sons in the same period, as well as the emerging significance of commerce as a source of wealth. Muriel Nazzari has argued that in the eighteenth century "marriage bargain" husbands brought in more wealth typically [End Page 277] than wives, and that inheritance was less important than commerce.1 The fact that children and their spouses did not fare equally in eighteenth-century Brazil was not solely a product of inheritance or family strategies. Individual characteristics, career choice and private business initiatives also played a part. While...

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