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(19891999), although most informed students of theseyears have long known that Mart nez de Hoz was notneoliberal because of any dismantling of Argentinas

state capitalism or the privatization of publicly ownedcompaniesof which there were virtually nonebutbecause of his radical deregulation of the banking sys-tem, a process which Veigel cogently analyzes andrightly argues was the main factor contributing to Ar-gentinas massive foreign debt. Subsequent chapterscompellingly dissect in detail the dilemma of the re-stored democratic governments of the 1980s and 1990s,unable to find a successful economic model which

would both restore competitiveness to the economy andtame inflation, culminating with the default on the for-eign debt and implosion of the economy in late 2001during the government of Fernando de la Rua.Throughout these and other chapters, the real strengthof the book is Veigels weaving together of the pres-

sures and constraints of the international economy withthe national context.The book ends on a somewhat confusing note. After

having largely left capitalist groups out of his story, orat least only tangentially presenteven the powerfulholding companies, or grup os econ omi cos in the Argen-tine political vernacular, who dominated the economyin the 1980s and 1990she abruptly resurrects theshopworn and highly normative characterization of the

Argentine crony capitalists, a predatory businessclass that exploits the states weakness for its own ag-grandizement at the cost of the national economys wellbeing, not to mention that of other groups and socialclasses. Given the relative autonomy he grants to policymakers throughout his narrative, this is a puzzling as-sertion. To be credible, his contention that the absenceof clear rules of the game and protection of propertyrights explains the countrys crony capitalist businessculture and therefore its paralysis needed to figuremore prominently in the previous chapters, rather thanbeing tacked on as almost an afterthought in the booksfinal pages. The assertion itself is highly questionable.

As recent developments in the world economy havedemonstrated, the existence of both rules of the gameand protected property rights do not prevent cronyism.Such a characterization obfuscates as much as it ex-plains about the history of capitalism and capitalists inthe modern world. This flaw aside, the books limita-tions are more disciplinary than those of the author andcertainly do not diminish its value for students of Ar-gentina or those simply interested in Argentinas re-

markable decline from Latin Americas premier nationto chronic basket case. Though it does not provide allthe answers, it is valuable reading for understanding thecountrys ongoing crisis.

JAMES P. BRENNANUniversity of California,

Riverside

BRODWYN FISCHER. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship andInequali ty in Twe ntieth -Centur y Rio de Ja neiro. Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2008. Pp. xx, 464.$65.00.

Brodwyn Fischers book will occupy a significant placeat the intersection of studies of modern urban design,patronage, and citizenship in Latin America. The basicthesis is that a lack of legal rights defined the strugglesof the inhabitants of twentieth-century Rio de Janeiroas they settled, worked, and appropriated the capital ofBrazil. Denial of rightsto stable occupation of theland, to recognized family relations, to the status of

worker, to due process of lawwas, in Fischers view,more important than race, class, or gender in definingthe historical identity of the majority of the inhabitantsof the cidade maravilhosa. Characterizing heteroge-neous populations simply as the urban poor is unsat-isfactory but, as the author recognizes, inevitable. Yetpoverty is not to be understood exclusively in materialterms, but also as a limited citizenship.

The evidence, covering the 19201970 period in over-lapping chronological layers, is divided in sections de-fined by autonomous juridical realms. Although codi-fication provides the structure, descriptions show howlegal practice molded the law. In the first part, elite ur-ban design fueled the impulse to raze or displace lower-class housing, creating irresolvable tensions in the con-text of demographic growth and loading perceptions ofsocial difference with a difficult mix of racism, real es-tate speculation, and hygiene. The second part of thebook examines labor rights granted under Getulio Var-gas and enhances our understanding of the social andcultural foundations of Latin American populism. In afew words, it took a lot of work to become a w orker: thestate created a thick labyrinth of paperwork, from birth

certificates all the way up to employment cards, whichleft many without a claim to the guarantees inscribed inBrazilian laws. Bureaucracy was not a transparent in-strument of policy but the policy itself, by creating theexclusions that made populism conceivable and afford-able for Varguismo. The third part of the book examinesthe effects of these exclusions on peoples access to jus-tice. Fischer explains judicial procedures and out comesbased on an extensive sample of cases and a study of

judicial practices and ideolog ies. She finds that race wasnot the single or most important source of bias (p.185); instead, increasingly frequent socially discrimi-natory judgments about personal character (p. 178)limited accessto civilrights in this key realm ofcariocas interaction with the state. The fourth part of the book

returns to the disputes around illegal settlements.Favelas were the locus of popular identities, capitalistgreed, and partisan disputes, bringing in a complex castof characters linked by a perverse dependence (p.252) on the rents and resources of illegality. Literal andfigurative battles show favelados always demanding so-cial and individual rights, often with durable successand even favorable legislation passed in 1956.

This mixed legacy of popular claims and official with-holding of rights forces the reader to maintain a criticalengagement with the idea that the absence of those

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2010

Poverty of citizenship.

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rights is what defines popular urban identities. The ev-idence shows the multiple ways in which citizenship wasundermined, corroborating urban studies that posit il-

legality not as the exception but as the defining trait ofeveryday life and state-civil society relations in modernLatin America. Even if we agree that progressive con-stitutional articles were frankly utopian (p. 116), thebook shows the advance of rightsto health, labor, jus-tice, and housingduring the twentieth century. Al-though cariocas saw the steep obstacles raised by thesystem, they still petitioned, occupied lands, voted,demonstrated, and went to court. In spite of imposedsocial labels and bureaucratic hurdles, men and womendefined themselves as workers who contributed to theirfamilies, communities, and country.

Fischer uses letters, court testimonies, samba lyrics,and other sources to observe citizen engagement withthe state. She suspects the sincerity of some of their

words, suggesting that the claim of rights was a productof expedience rather than belief, a tool just as efficientas appeals for graceful favors or patriarchal protection.But the textual evidence also confirms the integrativepower of populist language. Populist rhetoric did notresult in a negative definition of urban dwellers as non-citizens, but worked as an effective path for a mean-ingful engagement with authorities traditionally de-tached from urban populations, and eventuallypromoted a more positive self-perception of Brazilian

workers. In the last pages of the book, politics seems tobe counterposed to rights. Indeed, the morally ambig-uous negotiations or violence that characterize masspolitics seem the opposite of the rationality of the law,and clientelistic official tolerance of illegality appearsto be the reverse of true recognition of rights. Yet the

book itself threads between the interpretive poles ofpatronage versus republicanism that often divide thehistoriography of modern Latin American politics: Riode Janeiro was not a territory of lawlessness and prag-matic negotiations about power or subordination, nora laboratory of Western republican thinking about cit-izenship and liberal rights. It is the object of a booksensitive to the realities of life in the modern Latin

American city.PABLO PICCATOColumbia University

EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL

EFREM ZAMBON. Tradition and Innovation: Sicily be-tween Hellenism and Rome. (Historia: Einzelschriften,number 205.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 2008. Pp.326. 62.00.

The political history of Sicily between 289 and 241 B.C.was complex and chaotic. There were dozens of com-peting independent states on the island: Syracuse strug-gled against Carthage; various Greek cities struggledagainst Syracuse; the Elymaean polities of western Sic-ily struggled against Punic domination; second-rank cit-ies such as Akragas (Agrigentum) and Messana rose to

sudden power and then lost it again. Authoritarian rul-ers arose out of the necessity to provide local protectionagainst the general violence, styling themselves in the

Hellenistic way as kings; but they contested for powerwithin their own domains with both oligarchies anddemocratic assemblies, and civil wars and politicalpurges were not uncommon. Just between 288 and 285B.C. Hicetas, the leader of Syracuse, had to face (in se-quence) a civil war, a major threat from Carthage, amajor threat posed to the Syracusans by their own re-bellious mercenaries, the Italic Mamertines, and a ma-

jor threat from Phi ntias the king of Agrigentum (p. 63).Reading about this in Efrem Zambons study, one isreminded of the dismaying sequence of Asia Minor en-emies that King Attalus I listed one after the other onhis Victory Monument of ca. 230 (OGIS 273279). Sic-ily in the mid-third century was thus a classic case studyin the anarchy that characterized the ancient Mediter-ranean from Spain to Syria in the five centuries beforethe rise of Rome. It was Roman power that in the endimposed a rough and ready version of peace upon allthis violent disorder (in Roman interests, of course).

There are huge gaps in our knowledge of this anar-chic, politically kaleidoscopic, and crucial period in Sic-ily, a period that eventually saw Romes successful first

venture in war and hegemony beyond the Italian pen-insula. Polybius does not deal in any detail with con-ditions in Sicily before the arrival of the Romans in 264B.C., and our other surviving literary-historical sourcesare fragmentary. Zambons book possesses two virtues.First, he offers a complete conspectus in English of allthe known evidencenot merely literary sources butalso the latest archaeological discoveries, as well asanalysis of coinage. Second, his perspective is not that

of the great powers (Rome or Carthage) but isgrounded in the experience of the smaller polities. Thisis refreshing, and here we can glimpse complex polit-ical, ethnic, and cultural realities. Thus the Italic rulersof Messana on the straits between Sicily and Italy, de-scendants of the Mamertine mercenaries who hadseized this important city ca. 287, ruled over a multi-cultural polity where the Italic term meddix for the twoannual chief magistrates was written in Greek; the war-lord who became King Phintias of Agrigentum in the280s founded a new major city in his mini-kingdom,named after himself in imitation of Alexander theGreat (it was called Phintias, like the scores of Alex-andrias founded by the Conqueror); Elymaean Segestain western Sicily hated the tax-collecting Carthaginians

and played upon (or invented outright) the myth of itsfounding by Aeneas in order to gain Roman favor andsupport. Zambon also emphasizes that the hegemonyRome established in Sicily during the quarter-centuryof war with Carthage between 264 and 241 sat morelightly on the smaller Sicilian states than either Punicor Syracusan rule had ever done. The Romans under-stood that a light hand reaches farther, and the insti-tutions of direct Roman rule in Sicily only developed

very slowly, in response to subsequen t crises (such asthe Hannibalic War).

592 Reviews of Books

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2010