8/4/2019 Eisenberg_on Slave Life in Rio

1/4

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Peter L. EisenbergSource: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 375-377Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/204715 .

Accessed: 04/09/2011 23:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Interdisciplinary History.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/204715?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/204715?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

8/4/2019 Eisenberg_on Slave Life in Rio

2/4

REVIEWS | 375Slave Life in Rio deJaneiro, 18o8-1850. By Mary C. Karasch (Princeton,Princeton University Press, I987) 422 pp. $85.oo"Rio had the largest urban slave population in the Americas" (xxi). InI849, the census takers counted 78,855 slaves in Rio deJaneiro, Brazil'smajor port and imperial capital, three times as many as in New Orleansin I840, and four times as many as in Charleston in I850. But unlikethe two largest Deep South urban slave populations, between one halfand three fourths of Rio's captives came from Africa.Karasch sought "to locate and describe the realities of slave life andculture as slaves themselves experienced them" (xxiii). She questionedtwo "myths" that were widely accepted. First, related to treatment,were Brazilian masters benevolent, and did urban slaves suffer less thanplantation slaves? Second, related to culture, did Brazilian slaves comemostly from West Africa, and were the blacks in Rio de Janeiro unableto maintain their African cultural traditions?Her book critically analyzes an impressive collection of 210 travel-ers' accounts, including a dozen rarely read narratives in German, aswell as police and hospital records, customshouse and tax lists, news-papers, notarial files, and iconography. Karasch confirms the suggestionby Curtin and Klein that the slaves in Rio came from West CentralAfrica (the Congo south to Benguela), whereas the slaves in Bahia andthe northeast were from West Africa (from the more northerly Calabarand Mina coasts).1 African boys and girls under age fifteen made upnearly two thirds of the cargoes in eleven ships captured by Britishpatrols; the proportion of such children was only one third in anotherfour ships, but the strong impression remains that the Rio slave tradedealt principally in young adolescents.Diverse criteria determined slave status: occupation, sex, age, lead-ership role, and the owner's financial and social position. Not surpris-ingly, "never did the owners allow their slaves to have any decision-making power over them or to outrank them in wealth and status" (91).But Karasch gives ample evidence that the urban environment allowedslaves to have certain decision-making powers over their own lives. Forexample, because of the free population's alleged disdain for manuallabor, the slaves of Rio worked in many capacities, from gardening andstock-tending through domestic and transport services, peddling, andpublic works, to crafts and factories. Much of this work proceededwithout constant supervision, and city slaves often earned money; as aresult, they could purchase jewelry, other slaves, and real estate, andsome eventually bought their own freedom. The crafts and transporta-tion services were rewarding enough so that the free poor overcametheir scorn for manual labor and petitioned the authorities to restrict theaccess of slaves to these activities.I Philip D. Curtin, The AtlanticSlave Trade:A Census(Madison, I969), 239-240; HerbertS. Klein, The MiddlePassage: ComparativeStudiesin the Atlantic Slave Trade(Princeton,1978), 76-77.

8/4/2019 Eisenberg_on Slave Life in Rio

3/4

376 I PETER L. EISENBERGSlave Life in Rio contains a wealth of demographic data on themortality and morbidity of slaves. Slave deaths outstripped baptisms,

and slave-ship lists and burial records reveal that one fifth of the Africansdied during their first three years in Brazil, two thirds of the Brazilian-born slaves died before age ten, and female slaves died at younger agesthan males. In Rio, disease and poverty, not abortion or infanticide,kept the slave birth rate low, and Karasch estimates that "since half ofher [the average slave mother's] children were likely to die by age six,the odds were against her raising more than two children to the age atwhich they in turn would bear children" (Io7). If, for genetic reasons,the slaves suffered especially from vitamin D deficiencies, lactose intol-erance, and sickle-cell anemia, they also had greaterresistanceto yellowfever and malaria. Pulmonary tuberculosis was the single greatest causeof death. Thus low social and economic status, in a filthy city, ratherthan specifically endemic or epidemic tropical diseases, contributed mostto the high slave death rates.Two fascinating ethnographic chapters describe slave culture andgroup life. Karasch identifies African elements in etiquette, food, cloth-ing, the arts, and recreation, and traces the origin of modern spiritistumbanda eligions to West Central African practices. Rather than a syn-cretic blending of Catholic and African beliefs, most of the slaves in Riocontinued African rites, manipulating Christian myths, symbols, im-ages, and rituals in African ways. Community life could include churchmarriage, although this possibility was relatively uncommon. Highnumbers of both slaves and free men competed for the marriageablefemale slaves-in I849, the ratio of male to female slaves was 151/100,and the ratio of free males to females was I44/100. Marriage was ex-pensive and adequate housing difficult to find; the port's flourishingprostitution "affected the number and stability of nuclear family units"(295). Owners resisted creating a bond that could make future salesdifficult; priests distrusted the sincerity of the slaves' Catholicism, andthe slaves themselves often preferrednon-Catholic marriages.A sense of community also grew out of common ethnic origins,shared experiences on the slave-ships, street fighting gangs, work-groups, savings associations, and religious brotherhoods, as well asmen's drinking and whoring. Karasch suspects that women also hadassociational activities, but cannot be positive because the travelers,almost exclusively male, "did not penetrate the slave women's groupsof the nineteenth century" (298).The last two chapters deal with withdrawal, resistance, and man-umission. Slaves often fled their masters after beatings or broken prom-ises, and small runaway communities appearedin the hills and outlyingsections of the city. A few slaves who had been banished for crimes,and freedmen who could afford ship passage, even reached Africa. Kar-asch wonders why collective revolts exploded in Salvador, the capitalof Bahia, so much more frequently than in Rio deJaniero, and attributesthe difference to Rio's greaterethnic diversity and status differences, and

8/4/2019 Eisenberg_on Slave Life in Rio

4/4

REVIEWS | 377to the intimidating presence of the Imperial government's repressiveforces. She thereby recognizes, but does not elaborate upon, the impor-tance of more explicit comparisons of the slave culture of Rio with thatof Salvador, Brazil's second-largest urban slave society.2In her research on manumission from slavery Karasch examinedletters freeing 1,319 slaves during the period from 1807 to 183I. Likeother scholars, she found that females were manumitted more often thanmen since women were cheaper, on more intimate terms with theirowners, and often subject to continuing domestic discipline. Only onefifth of the freed slaves (typically lovers, children, the aged, and thesick) were manumitted unconditionally, whereas two fifths had to buytheir freedom, and one third had to serve for a specified number of yearsor until their owner's death. For the master, manumission representedyet another means of control, and not an expression of benevolence. Forthe ex-slaves, freedperson status entailed the right to wear shoes, to ownproperty, to decide with whom and where to live and work, and, formales, to vote and to become army officers or priests.This book's principal value lies in its extensive research in bothdescriptive and quantitative materials, the latter conveniently detailed insixty-six tables and two long appendices. Karasch's determination topresent the slaves' point of view, a welcome relief from master-orientedstudies, in turn raises the question whether a slave's legal status was themain element in a slave's identity. She mentions, for example, that in"the I84os . . . slaves began to lose their prominent place in the craftsto white competitors," and that the prevailing view, at odds with legalprinciple, was that all blacks were slaves unless they could prove oth-erwise (200). Did informal segregation based on color increase duringthe period? Did slaves' solidarity with free blacks extend to other freepoor in the labor market? Did race and class, along with legal condition,limit opportunities?Regrettably, the book omits a concluding chapter, wherein theauthor could have placed her discussion in a broader context. For ex-ample, Karasch's evidence on the benevolence of masters in Rio couldhave been contrasted with data available for the United States and theCaribbean.3 Similarly, the analysis of acculturation and mobility couldhave referred to the historiography on immigration, voluntary and oth-erwise. Nevertheless, this highly readable book is the richest historicalpicture of urban slavery in the Americas.

Peter L. EisenbergUniversidade Estadual de Campinas2 The bibliography oes not includeKatiaM. de Queir6sMattoso,Bahia:A Cidade oSalvadore Seu Mercadono SeculoXIX (Sao Paulo, I978).3 Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964); ClaudiaDale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860: A QuantatitiveHistory(Chicago, 1976); Barry W. Higman, Slave Populationand EconomyinJamaica, 1807-1834(Cambridge, 1976).