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Review: [untitled] Author(s): Peter L. Eisenberg Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 375-377 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/204715 . Accessed: 04/09/2011 23:22
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Slave 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). In I849, the census takers counted 78,855 slaves in Rio deJaneiro, Brazil's major port and imperial capital, three times as many as in New Orleans in I840, and four times as many as in Charleston in I850. But unlike the two largest Deep South urban slave populations, between one half and three fourths of Rio's captives came from Africa. Karasch sought "to locate and describe the realities of slave life and culture as slaves themselves experienced them" (xxiii). She questioned two "myths" that were widely accepted. First, related to treatment, were Brazilian masters benevolent, and did urban slaves suffer less than plantation slaves? Second, related to culture, did Brazilian slaves come mostly from West Africa, and were the blacks in Rio de Janeiro unable to maintain their African cultural traditions? Her book critically analyzes an impressive collection of 210 travelers' accounts, including a dozen rarely read narratives in German, as well as police and hospital records, customshouse and tax lists, newspapers, notarial files, and iconography. Karasch confirms the suggestion by Curtin and Klein that the slaves in Rio came from West Central Africa (the Congo south to Benguela), whereas the slaves in Bahia and the northeast were from West Africa (from the more northerly Calabar and Mina coasts).1 African boys and girls under age fifteen made up nearly two thirds of the cargoes in eleven ships captured by British patrols; the proportion of such children was only one third in another four ships, but the strong impression remains that the Rio slave trade dealt principally in young adolescents. Diverse criteria determined slave status: occupation, sex, age, leadership role, and the owner's financial and social position. Not surprisingly, "never did the owners allow their slaves to have any decisionmaking power over them or to outrank them in wealth and status" (91). But Karasch gives ample evidence that the urban environment allowed slaves to have certain decision-making powers over their own lives. For example, because of the free population's alleged disdain for manual labor, the slaves of Rio worked in many capacities, from gardening and stock-tending through domestic and transport services, peddling, and public works, to crafts and factories. Much of this work proceeded without constant supervision, and city slaves often earned money; as a result, they could purchase jewelry, other slaves, and real estate, and some eventually bought their own freedom. The crafts and transportation services were rewarding enough so that the free poor overcame their scorn for manual labor and petitioned the authorities to restrict the access of slaves to these activities.
I Philip D. Curtin, The AtlanticSlave Trade:A Census(Madison, I969), 239-240; Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: ComparativeStudies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton,
1978), 76-77.

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PETER L. EISENBERG

Slave Life in Rio contains a wealth of demographic data on the mortality and morbidity of slaves. Slave deaths outstripped baptisms, and slave-ship lists and burial records reveal that one fifth of the Africans died during their first three years in Brazil, two thirds of the Brazilianborn slaves died before age ten, and female slaves died at younger ages than males. In Rio, disease and poverty, not abortion or infanticide, kept the slave birth rate low, and Karasch estimates that "since half of her [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 at which they in turn would bear children" (Io7). If, for genetic reasons, the slaves suffered especially from vitamin D deficiencies, lactose intolerance, and sickle-cell anemia, they also had greater resistance to yellow fever and malaria. Pulmonary tuberculosis was the single greatest cause of death. Thus low social and economic status, in a filthy city, rather than specifically endemic or epidemic tropical diseases, contributed most to the high slave death rates. Two fascinating ethnographic chapters describe slave culture and group life. Karasch identifies African elements in etiquette, food, clothing, the arts, and recreation, and traces the origin of modern spiritist umbanda religions to West Central African practices. Rather than a syncretic blending of Catholic and African beliefs, most of the slaves in Rio continued African rites, manipulating Christian myths, symbols, images, and rituals in African ways. Community life could include church marriage, although this possibility was relatively uncommon. High numbers of both slaves and free men competed for the marriageable female 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 expensive and adequate housing difficult to find; the port's flourishing prostitution "affected the number and stability of nuclear family units" (295). Owners resisted creating a bond that could make future sales difficult; priests distrusted the sincerity of the slaves' Catholicism, and the slaves themselves often preferred non-Catholic marriages. A sense of community also grew out of common ethnic origins, shared experiences on the slave-ships, street fighting gangs, workgroups, savings associations, and religious brotherhoods, as well as men's drinking and whoring. Karasch suspects that women also had associational activities, but cannot be positive because the travelers, almost exclusively male, "did not penetrate the slave women's groups of the nineteenth century" (298). The last two chapters deal with withdrawal, resistance, and manumission. Slaves often fled their masters after beatings or broken promises, and small runaway communities appeared in the hills and outlying sections of the city. A few slaves who had been banished for crimes, and freedmen who could afford ship passage, even reached Africa. Karasch wonders why collective revolts exploded in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, so much more frequently than in Rio deJaniero, and attributes the difference to Rio's greater ethnic diversity and status differences, and

REVIEWS | 377 to the intimidating presence of the Imperial government's repressive forces. She thereby recognizes, but does not elaborate upon, the importance of more explicit comparisons of the slave culture of Rio with that of Salvador, Brazil's second-largest urban slave society.2 In her research on manumission from slavery Karasch examined letters freeing 1,319 slaves during the period from 1807 to 183I. Like other scholars, she found that females were manumitted more often than men since women were cheaper, on more intimate terms with their owners, and often subject to continuing domestic discipline. Only one fifth of the freed slaves (typically lovers, children, the aged, and the sick) were manumitted unconditionally, whereas two fifths had to buy their freedom, and one third had to serve for a specified number of years or until their owner's death. For the master, manumission represented yet another means of control, and not an expression of benevolence. For the ex-slaves, freedperson status entailed the right to wear shoes, to own property, to decide with whom and where to live and work, and, for males, to vote and to become army officers or priests. This book's principal value lies in its extensive research in both descriptive and quantitative materials, the latter conveniently detailed in sixty-six tables and two long appendices. Karasch's determination to present the slaves' point of view, a welcome relief from master-oriented studies, in turn raises the question whether a slave's legal status was the main element in a slave's identity. She mentions, for example, that in "the I84os . . . slaves began to lose their prominent place in the crafts to white competitors," and that the prevailing view, at odds with legal principle, was that all blacks were slaves unless they could prove otherwise (200). Did informal segregation based on color increase during the period? Did slaves' solidarity with free blacks extend to other free poor in the labor market? Did race and class, along with legal condition, limit opportunities? Regrettably, the book omits a concluding chapter, wherein the author could have placed her discussion in a broader context. For example, Karasch's evidence on the benevolence of masters in Rio could have been contrasted with data available for the United States and the Caribbean.3 Similarly, the analysis of acculturation and mobility could have referred to the historiography on immigration, voluntary and otherwise. Nevertheless, this highly readable book is the richest historical picture of urban slavery in the Americas. Peter L. Eisenberg Universidade Estadual de Campinas
2

do The bibliography does not includeKatiaM. de Queir6sMattoso, Bahia:A Cidade

Salvadore Seu Mercadono Seculo XIX (Sao Paulo, I978). 3 Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964); Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860: A Quantatitive History (Chicago, 1976); Barry W. Higman, Slave Populationand Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 (Cambridge, 1976).