Brazilian historiography has long been dominated by scholarship focusing on the nation's more economically dynamic regions. But in a territorially immense and culturally diverse country, shaped by and reflecting the uneven penetration of capital and insertion into the world market, the enthronement of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in postcolonial historiography risks the normative conflation of the southeast with the rest of Brazil. Studies of ‘peripheries’ are interesting not only because they provide a counterpoint to the political economy of ‘core’ areas but, also as Edward Said has shown, because they are intrinsic to their very ideological constitution.
David McCreery promises to plug the patchy historiography of Imperial Brazil (1822–1889) with a factually rich monograph of one such peripheral region, the province of Goiás. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, Goiás had enjoyed fleeting prosperity with a gold and diamond boom and its attendant socio-economic transformation: migration and population increase (including slaves), modest urbanisation, and a spike in interethnic violence. Yet by independence, the mining sector had contracted severely, convulsing the economy of the province. McCreery offers a sobering account of the postcolonial political economy of a frontier region hobbled by a precarious state structure and geographic remoteness from both inter-provincial and international trade circuits – engendered or exacerbated by anaemic public revenues, shortage of capital, the absence of a competitive export crop, high cost of transport, epidemics and Indian attacks. McCreery's chapters provide a thorough analysis of discrete aspects of Goiás's economy – modes of production (including a dwindling slave labour force numerically overshadowed by a large free, if dependent, population), stock raising (the province's leading ‘export’ through inter-provincial trade), subsistence agriculture (the primary pursuit of rural smallholders), land tenure (highly skewed and virtually unaffected by the Land Law of 1850 due to local opposition and the absence of a land market), residual mining, commerce, and ill-fated proto-industrial ventures. As a self-styled empiricist whose work is ‘frankly descriptive’ (p. 22), McCreery has cobbled together reams of statistical data from tax rolls, provincial reports and parish registries (whose accuracy he often rightfully questions) to produce a historical almanac of nineteenth-century Goiás. Although readers might begrudge a lack of narrative and a certain analytical overlap of chapters, the informative value of the book is unquestionable.
Straddling the economic and political history of nineteenth-century Goiás, McCreery's book particularly excels in its analysis of the rural economy. Specifically, his examination of small producers and subsistence farmers who formed not only the bulk of the rural population of Goiás, but of Brazil as a whole, offers an important corrective to traditional scholarship that has focused on export-oriented agriculture. As a political history of the nineteenth century, McCreery builds on the work of historians such as Richard Graham, Emilia Viotti da Costa, Thomas Flory and Judy Bieber in highlighting the gap between state institutions and liberal ideology and the realities of corruption, fraud and violence structuring political power and participation. In particular, McCreery emphasises geographic isolation, fiscal insolvency and crushing poverty as aggravating factors in the exercise of good government. McCreery does not directly engage the scholarship on state formation as cultural revolution that has pervaded, if not dominated, recent Spanish American and Brazilian historiography; likewise, the book does not interrogate nationalism's ideological allure to peripheral populations as an ‘imagined community’, in the words of Benedict Anderson (and endlessly repudiated or refashioned by his critics). In sum, there is scant discussion here of ritual, pageantry, symbol or discourse, which will undoubtedly displease the (not so) new cultural historians and a good number of graduate students. Yet, in fact, McCreery is cautioning historians against losing sight of the material forces that sustain or, perhaps more fittingly in this case, compromise state power. And in understated fashion, which some might view as reductionist, the ‘imagined community’ of goianos basically boils down to efforts of the provincial government to capture federal resources (key to keeping the region afloat); the consumerist longings of elites for the trappings of modernity supplied by domestic and foreign trade; and the extra-regional social networks structuring internal migration to the south and north of the state, from Minas Gerais and the northeast, respectively.
McCreery's analytical thrust, however, is compromised by a number of interpretative inconsistencies and contradictions that riddle the text. The problem is most pronounced in the introductory chapter and, to a lesser extent in the conclusion, in which he attempts awkwardly to situate his scholarship in the broader literature on frontiers. Defining the frontier alternatively as a process (p. 208) and a place – which in his rendition conjures a wilderness separating dispersed (non-indigenous) settlements – McCreery does not systematically interrogate frontiers as zones of multiple, intermittent and complex interpenetrations among social groups endowed with unequal power in the contest over resource allotment and cultural primacy. This speaks to a larger methodological problem of the book: the reliance on elite sources, unchecked by McCreery's spotty attempts to read against the grain, produces an interpretatively unbalanced study. For example, black slaves and indigenous peoples surface inexorably in the work, but principally in the context of their capacity to exert violence or subvert the dominant order – a clear reflection of the obsession of elites and the documentary trail that they generated (unacknowledged by McCreery), rather than a well-rounded assessment of their multifaceted roles and lived experiences in Goiás society. On a broader level, while McCreery argues that ‘how you experienced the century depended in large part where you were and what you did’, (p. 7) the profile of socio-economic desolation served up throughout the study ultimately reflects and validates the jeremiads of nineteenth-century goiano elites, rather than the historical experiences of the subaltern (and subsistent) populations. McCreery labels the trope of ‘decadence’ a discursive strategy of goiano elites, aware of this tension between dominant ideologies and social history, though his historical research never irons it out successfully. Only this analytical muddle could explain how after systematically bombarding the reader with the endless travails of Goiás's political economy, and without showing substantive macroeconomic improvement over time, could he shift gears to conclude that the province ‘in its modest way, prospered.’
