Over the course of the nineteenth century, Santos developed from an unexciting coastal town into one of Latin America's most bustling port cities, responding to the meteoric growth of São Paulo's coffee exports and to the expansion of a railroad network. Before it became known as the ‘Brazilian Barcelona’, in reference to the protagonism of organised labour on the waterfront, Santos served as a stage for one of the Brazilian Empire's most active abolitionist and republican movements. From the 1860s, if not before, Santos had become a Mecca for fugitive slaves, as several quilombos sprouted up in suburban and rural areas surrounding the city. One notable community was Pai Felipe's, in Cubatão, later transferred by abolitionists into the city. At the same time, these runaway agglomerations lay amidst neighbourhoods of free Africans who had worked for the state on the restoration of the road from São Paulo to the coast. By the 1870s a growing number of Santos residents had begun to advocate freedom for the slaves, who were increasingly present on the city's streets, raising concerns when they were not engaged in unloading sacks of coffee at the port's warehouses. Many of these slaves belonged to plantation owners, who dispatched them to work temporarily for coffee commission houses on the docks. This dynamic connection between upland plantations and the coffee export platform on the coast contributed to the emergence of Jabaquara, the greatest of all quilombos to develop in the final years of slavery, whose runaway population numbered in the thousands. At the same time, Santos itself boasted a rather modest slave population, distributed in smallholdings and occupied primarily in domestic service, street vending and small crop production.

Ian Read's book offers a detailed account of local slave owners, slaves and the social networks that slavery engendered in this city during the Brazilian Empire. He draws together and correlates myriad sources, published and unpublished, covering notarial, ecclesiastical, judicial, municipal and institutional records, providing a broad base for a minute study of a small and focused population. While claiming a Weberian approach for his study, he actually builds his social analysis in crossing information from disparate sources. As a result, the book offers a great deal of minutiae on slavery in the city, showing its spatial distribution both in town and in the surrounding areas, along with a profile of age, sex, occupational and marriage distribution among the enslaved population. However, notwithstanding the author's extensive research on local slavery, Hierarchies of Slavery fails to produce a productive dialogue with common knowledge about the city. A more critical look at the author's findings suggests that he did not problematise his sources adequately, at times establishing as absolute fact information constructed from fragmentary and often contradictory sources. As a result the book presents several original discoveries that unfortunately cannot be validated without first undertaking a serious review of the sources. Furthermore, the book contains erroneous information. For example, Read establishes that ‘When emancipation approached in the mid-1880s, the Imperial government created an Emancipation Fund to hasten a gradual abolition process’ (p. 3). The Emancipation Fund had been created much earlier, in 1871, with the Law of the Free Womb, although in some regions it was implemented only in the 1880s. Throughout the book, especially in the notes and bibliography, many of the references in Portuguese present primary mistakes.

The author divides his book into two parts: the first offers a socio-economic profile of slave owners, while the second focuses on the slaves, showing how different characteristics of the masters can be correlated to price, age, occupation and health variables among slaves. The book illustrates the spatial arrangement of the urban streets, the profile of the slave population in relation to the economic profile of the masters, the urban slave market, the slave family, the growth of the port, city ordinances and health conditions, among other topics. But there is insufficient discussion of the data presented, and inadequate context for the conclusions. The book does not include basic demographic information on the aggregate slave population and its changes over the decades, making it difficult to assess the significance of the findings. In the chapter entitled ‘Neighborhoods and Inequality’, a diagram based on 1,380 marriage records maps ties between the city's free families, whether wealthy, middling or poor, but although very elaborate, the figure adds little to what is already exhaustively known about marriage, concubinage and kinship patterns in nineteenth-century Brazil: that rich people married rich people, while the poor rarely married but rather created informal unions due to lack of funds to defray marriage fees. Here the author misses an opportunity to establish his findings in light of the literature on the Paulista family, which reveals much more informal and heterogeneous structures and relations than the ones usually associated with the powerful patriarchal families of the sugar mills in the north-east. The features of small slave holdings, female-headed households and poverty would have allowed the author to make more sense of the reality with which he is dealing. Many other tables and diagrams also lack a more inquisitive discussion. In the section on ‘Slave Punishment’ (pp. 114ff), the author presents several municipal ordinances as a guide to understanding social conduct in the city as well as the forms of vigilance and control of the slave population. Although the author reminds us that ‘Many of these rules may not have been strictly followed’, he concludes that ‘at the very least, they give a sense of how city officials imagined an orderly city and responsible residents to be’. At that point the author appears to take these city ordinances at face value, as if the city actually was orderly and controlled. Yet local writers and historians frequently portray Santos as a turbulent city, where quarteleiros and valongueiros – that is, residents of different neighbourhoods – fought each other on the streets. They also describe the city as dirty, poorly policed, and full of runaway slaves and homeless immigrants – in short, a city to be avoided due to its insalubrious conditions and lack of order. Elsewhere the author presents either superficial opinions or shallow analyses. When treating manumission, the author disregards much of the prevailing literature, which has consistently argued that slave agency played an important role in the construction of freedom and in the acquisition of manumission. According to Read, ‘slaves had little chance of forcing masters to accept manumission’ (p. 158). The author mistakenly asserts that the existing literature on manumission distinguishes only three forms (unconditionally free, onerous and conditional) and that he has discovered mixed forms – that is, manumission deeds that were both conditional and onerous. Furthermore, he concludes that freedom was not guaranteed in 16 per cent of the deeds he studied, since they only promised freedom in the future. Neither of these findings has the originality he claims, since these issues have been profusely discussed, including by several authors mentioned in Hierarchies of Slavery.

Read's chapter on ‘Illness, Recovery, and Death’ also cries out for a more meaningful analysis, again presenting previously unpublished data without discussing how he arrived at this information, qualifying how representative it is of the aggregate population of Santos, or examining the implications of diagnosing health issues through the filter of nineteenth-century medical knowledge. His findings on the absence or prevalence of epidemic diseases are too rash and peremptory. Finally, his chapter on ‘Manumissionists, Abolitionists, and Emancipation’ remains superficial and impressionistic while referring only to the late 1880s, thus ignoring much of the history of the strong abolitionist movement in Santos. The book's greatest problems lie in the lack of a more intricate problematisation of the data presented, along with the failure to recognise the greater role that Santos played in the political struggles which developed in São Paulo during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially those over abolitionism and republicanism. In short, the wealth of information unearthed by Ian Read in Hierarchies of Slavery awaits a more profound and consistent analysis.