The title ‘From Africa to Brazil’, like many titles these days, is too general for the scope of this book, which is much more specific: it follows the slave traffic between the Upper Guinea coast and the northern regions of Para and Maranhão in Brazil from 1600 to the 1830s. In fact its value is precisely in its specificity. The traffic between these areas has been less studied than that between Central Africa and the Gulf of Benin, on the one hand, and Bahia and Rio, which accounted for most of the shipments. The north of Brazil was a particular case in two senses: its relatively scarce production of export crops marginalized the region; and the ocean currents made it easier to sail from the ports of Belém and São Luís to Lisbon than to the south of Brazil. So the region was at once more marginal but also closer to the metropolis than other parts of Brazil. The importation of slaves to the north was considerably lower than to the south, and yet, as Hawthorne shows, most were coming from the area known in colonial times as Upper Guinea – the coast between contemporary Senegal and Sierra Leone. The history of this secondary, relatively marginal trade route is interesting in itself, but Hawthorne sets his task more concretely, as answering a general question: how Upper Guineans re-created their culture in the Americas. This question is perhaps the main weakness of the book. By insisting on looking for traces of this supposed re-creation, Hawthorne seems to lose the opportunity of giving a rounder picture of a colonial world that is interesting precisely because of its extreme marginality, imposing a plot (‘re-creation’) on a story that, from the data he is presenting, seems much more complex and ambiguous.

Hawthorne divides his narrative of re-creation around three main themes: labour, sex, and spiritual beliefs. In addressing the first of these, he describes how rice production was central to the subsistence economy of the colony, eventually to become an export crop in the late eighteenth century. In terms of re-creation, the author asks to what extent African expertise in rice production was implemented in the New World – and has to acknowledge that it wasn't that relevant, except for the use of certain tools and cooking. Rice in the region, as Hawthorne himself says, was not white or black or red, but ‘brown’. With regard to sexuality and marriage, he shows how people from Upper Guinea to some extent preferred to marry people from the same region – but at the same time he cannot but recognize that sexuality was a central tool of power in the colony, and that this power was exercised from the top down within the social hierarchy, in terms of both race and gender. The ‘agency’ of slaves in this landscape, as Hawthorne shows, is exercised as a subversion of the terms of engagement with masters.

The ambiguity of power relations mediated by sex runs parallel to the ambiguity of what Hawthorne calls ‘spiritual beliefs’. Following James H. Sweet, Hawthorne holds that Africans maintained and re-created a set of ‘core beliefs’. These core beliefs are located, first, in the existence of one creator; second, in the existence of spirits; third, in ascribing supernatural powers to some material objects; and fourth, in recognizing some people as particularly ‘gifted’ in dealing with spirits and powerful objects (p. 210). The notion of ‘core beliefs’ is so general that it could be applied not only to all Africans, but to most Europeans and Native Americans. European beliefs and practices of magic and sorcery in the colonial world could be defined in pretty much the same terms. In fact, objects like magic bags, the so-called bolsas de Mandinga, were central to most practices of sorcery throughout the Portuguese colonial world in the eighteenth century, even if often they were not made by people from the Mandinga area, or indeed contained much that made reference to it, but instead brought together objects and practices of different origins – European, Catholic, indigenous, African. Feitiçaria (sorcery) in the Portuguese colonial world does not seem just to re-create African beliefs and practices, but to create a new culture. Like rice and sex, sorcery was not black or white, but brown.

Hawthorne's data could take him much further than his core narrative of African re-creation, into describing the formation of a complex colonial culture in the periphery of the colonial world; a radically new culture, not just a survival or a hybrid. In fact, what I liked best about this book is that it provides a lot of information that does not exactly fit its proposed argument, but shows instead the excellent quality of the research.