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Reviewed by:
  • Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889
  • Robert W. Wilcox
McCreery, David . Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 297 pp.

In the 1970s a historian of Goiás described the province during the Brazilian Empire as suffering "a century without history"(7). This assessment viewed [End Page 193] Goiás over the period as a backwater, insignificant to political and economic elites on the Brazilian coast, contributing little to the national economy. Such perceptions have been the bane of more circumspect students of the Brazilian sertão for decades, for Goiás was not alone in its isolation. While most of the vast country appeared marginal to the major political and economic activities occurring on or near the coast, in Frontier Goiás David McCreery explains admirably why Goiás and the rest of the sertão matter.

The introduction title, "A Province on the Edge of the Modern World," is hardly reassuring of the region's significance but reflects well the thesis of the book. Drawing from the field of Frontier/Borderland Studies, McCreery characterizes Goiás of the nineteenth century as a "Swiss cheese" frontier, or perhaps as "a congeries of frontiers" (17–18). The province experienced some economic activity throughout the period, but only in certain sectors and with little significant long-term development. The author argues that Goiás was viewed by outsiders and locals alike as an "unsuccessful frontier" (22) because it seemed to be in a state of stagnation, as if nothing had changed from the previous century. The region, he suggests, remained poor because capitalism had little interest in it while competition between settlers and native peoples for minimal local resources caused them to be "locked in a bloody balance of weakness" (22).

Yet there was a productive world here, and to illustrate McCreery has organized the book into chapters on the role and power of the state, industrial and commercial relations, agriculture, ranching, land, and work. Each discusses the importance of these activities in the province's structure, revealing the clear differences and sometimes rivalries between the relatively more prosperous south and the frontier-of-the-frontier in the north. Politically, Goiás was an example of how the Brazilian Empire managed to maintain stability against what seemed to be long odds. Compared to Brazil's Spanish American neighbors national violence was relatively minimal. Here, as in so much of the country, political and economic control rested with local political powerbrokers (coronéis), on whom the Imperial government was politically dependent, and who were willing to tolerate authority in Rio de Janeiro so long as it permitted autonomy at the regional level. Reinforced by a deficit of qualified officials, law was in the hands of these potentates and an entrenched system of patronage. Whenever law came into conflict with custom the latter invariably won out, extending even to the police and army. As emphasized in other studies of Brazil, this played a large part in the Empire's political continuity.

For the most part the Goiás economy changed little from the 1820s to the 1890s. After colonial prosperity alluvial mining had declined, food production was basic and largely for local consumption, communications slow and tortuous, and cattle ranching rudimentary. Resistance to taxation was common and smuggling widespread. Ironic in a rural society, most provincial tax revenue came from a few small urban centers. This forced the Imperial government to subsidize the provincial treasury, and while there were scattered attempts to [End Page 194] improve conditions and infrastructure that might pull Goiás out of its isolation, most failed.

This didn't mean that residents of Goiás lacked vision. As in similar regions of Brazil many goianos sought to develop their province and looked to imported technologies and ideas. There was some immigration from neighboring provinces, mostly itinerant traders or ranchers seeking readily-accessible land, and by 1890 telegraph lines crossed the province and railroads were approaching. However, environmental and economic conditions limited innovation. As McCreery makes clear early in the book: "Goiás's inhabitants were conservative but not stupid, and in the sertão they knew that the line separating survival from catastrophe...

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