Usually examined in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the relations between the United States and Brazil have been undergoing a significant reassessment. Over the past decade, the primary historiographical innovation on the theme has been to step back in time in order to understand the integration between both countries on economic (trade in wheat and coffee and technological entrepreneurship), political (institutional and individual relations between Brazilians and North Americans), and social spheres (struggles surrounding slavery). Roberto Saba’s American Mirror arrives contributes to and diversifies the discussions around these three dimensions of this history.
Drawing on modernization theory, the book aims to explain how a group of reformers from both countries worked together to end slavery and create conditions for the development of capitalism in Brazil. Within this broader objective, Saba divided the book into two parts. In the first, titled “A New World Unchained,” the author argues in three chapters that pro-slavery interests were insufficient for effective integration between the southern empire and the northern republic. In the second part, titled “The World That Free Labor Made,” Saba discusses in three additional chapters various facets of the integration between Brazilians and North Americans (the invention of agricultural machinery, engineering works, migration, educational projects, etc.) to demonstrate how they were central to the abolition of slavery and the implementation of a wage labor system in Brazil.
Overall, the book presents highly intriguing findings that shed new light on the relationship between the United States and Latin America in the second half of the 19th century. As the author himself announces in the introduction, his interest lies not only in “exchange” and “mobility” – aspects emphasized by the “transnational history” approach that he employs – but also in “structural changes” (pp. 10-11). With a robust, rich, and varied set of sources, the primary contribution of American Mirror is to demonstrate how the often-joint actions of historical agents from Brazil and the United States became constitutive elements of a structural transformation that marked the advance of capitalism in both societies. Ultimately, the book empirically substantiates the transition from the British systemic cycle of accumulation to the North American one, with the Empire of Brazil as the main unit of observation.
Despite its strengths, American Mirror also presents some less convincing results for those who know the subject. The first of these concerns the unsuccessful attempt to counter the ideas of an “international proslavery,” proposed by Rafael Marquese and Tâmis Parron, and “pro-slavery internationalism,” put forward by Matthew Karp. Based on diplomatic documentation, the author concludes that Southern slaveholders “could not establish an effective foreign policy in defense of slavery,” failing to “convince Brazil […] to embark on a proslavery crusade” (p. 19). However, the conclusion does not differ very much from the one defended by the authors being criticized: Marquese and Parron stress that the international proslavery had as its limit the “the inability of its proponents to formally transform the international proslavery program into a consistent agenda” (The Politics of Second Slavery, 2016, p. 51); Karp, on the other hand, argues that there was a “structural weakness of U.S. proslavery internationalism” (The Vast Southern Empire, 2016, p. 79). Saba compares the failure of US southerners to a supposed success of “northern modernizers,” this does not mean that there were no clear attempts to form an international proslavery between the 1830s and the onset of the US Civil War.
Another questionable aspect of American Mirror lies in Saba’s readiness to accept many of the arguments from his sources, as if the intentions of historical actors – especially those in the US – corresponded directly to the course of history itself. Despite the author’s critique of the naturalization of free labor by northern “modernizers,” the same level of detachment does not occur when slavery is the subject. Although this issue pervades many cases discussed in the book – the introduction of steamship lines (pp. 80-92), a series of urban transports (pp. 69-80), and agricultural machinery (pp. 143-153 and 228-238) – it is worth focusing on an illustrative example of how Saba views the past through the lens of historical actors themselves.
When describing some US ventures in Brazil, the author highlights how William Milnor Roberts, who was responsible for building the second stretch of the Dom Pedro Segundo Railroad, believed in the anti-slavery implications of his work. For the engineer, the rails would directly contribute to accelerating the abolitionist process in Brazil since they “would open the plantations to the outside world and open the minds of the backward planters” (p. 67). However, history was more diverse and plural than Roberts’ and other US entrepreneurs’ intentions suggested. As Brazilian historians know all too well, the most immediate effect of railway expansion was the expansion of the coffee frontier. Until it was used by abolitionists to dismantle slavery, the train contributed to intensify slavery. The example serves to demonstrate that the history of the struggle for abolition cannot be summarized, as Saba argues, as a “well-planned collaboration connecting Brazil to the United States” (p. 264). As Emilia Viotti da Costa – a historian claimed by the author – taught us a long time ago, any serious history needs to go beyond the “testimony view” if it intends to grasp the structural elements of the past (Dialética Invertida, 2014, pp. 113-133).
The case above leads us to a fundamental question that permeates the entire work and is related to the author’s theoretical choices. By considering Brazil as an “American mirror,” Saba presents us with a history whose transformations primarily stem from the “modernizing” historical actors of the North Atlantic. Although this perspective can open new historiographical approaches, it also brings with it the danger of losing sight of the specificities of Brazilian history. While it is evident that the Empire of Brazil was systemically integrated into the United States in the second half of the 19th century – as the book demonstrates very well – it is also true that Brazilian history did not unfold merely as a reflection of US history.
Dr. Youssef is author of Imprensa e escravidão: política e tráfico negreiro no Império do Brasil, 1822-1850 (2016) and several articles.
