Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. Whereas historians such as Leslie M. Bethell and Emília Viotti da Costa were among the first scholars to write monographs exploring the history of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in Brazil, historians such as Maria Helena Machado have shown how bondspeople fled and organized revolts during the years that preceded the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Likewise, leading historians João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes have also explained how enslaved people emancipated themselves and joined runaway slave communities in Brazil’s northeast and southeast regions. More recent studies by Celso Thomas Castilho, Angela Alonso, and Jeffrey Needell have underscored the crucial role of enslaved and freed men and women in the abolitionist movement in Rio de Janeiro and Northeastern Brazil. Mainly focusing on the United States, Manisha Sinha’s award-winning The Slave’s Cause (unfortunately not cited by Mota) has highlighted the central role of Black abolitionists in the United States, thereby reinforcing this new shift in the historiography of slavery that centers on enslaved people and their descendants in the fight for emancipation.

Following this trend, Freedom’s Horizon reframes and redefines the history of Brazilian abolitionism in two ways. First, it locates the rise of a Brazilian abolitionism movement in the daily lives of enslaved people in the 1840s, earlier than what has been established in the historiography of emancipation. Second, Mota underscores how bondspeople’s abolitionist activities were deeply connected to the international context. Several enslaved and freed abolitionists were born on the African continent and assigned the legal status of free Africans (africanos livres). They engaged with ideas from French and British abolitionists and officials, which gained traction in the Atlantic world and Brazil after the British slave trade ended in 1807. Mota shows how this transnational dialogue continued after the first prohibition of the international trade in captive Africans to Brazil in 1831, persisted with the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848, and lasted until the end of the slave trade to Cuba in 1867. Black Brazilian insurgents mobilized Catholicism and African religions as other enslaved insurgents have done in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and the United States to channel anti-slavery ideas. They closely monitored the tumultuous rise of the US Civil War and the impacts of the Triple Alliance War in the 1860s.

Using an array of manuscript documents such as petitions and criminal files from the Arquivo Público Mineiro and the Arquivo do Itamaraty, and especially the Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, along with printed primary sources such as pamphlets, newspaper articles, and some visual sources, unlike previous works focusing mostly on Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco, Freedom’s Horizon offers a much broader view of insurgent abolitionism. Mota, skilled in Portuguese-language Brazilian historiography, examines case studies from the southeast, northeast, south, and north of Brazil, mainly from the 1860s. In the vein of works such as Julius Scott’s The Common Wind, Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror, Cristina Soriano’s Tides of Revolution, and more recently Chloe Ireton’s Slavery and Freedom, which have all explored the circulation of ideas of emancipation and freedom in the Atlantic World, Mota demonstrates how enslaved people in Brazil developed networks through daily oral and written exchanges. They used a variety of ideas and literacy practices to organize revolts and join maroon communities (quilombos), calling for their own emancipation and taking their cause into their own hands. While drawing on this extensive international context that deeply shaped the rise of insurgent abolitionism in Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century, Mota importantly illuminates the neglected stories of dozens of men and women such as João, Estevão, Cláudio, Sam (or Benjamin), Custódio, Anastácio Congo, Isidoro Congo, Teresa Conga, Teresa Cabinda, Marcelina, Leocádia, Cyro, Victorina, Maria Luiza, Agostinho, Vicente, Francisco, Pedro, Rafael, Luísa, and José Crioulo, though sometimes leaving the reader curious to know more about the trajectories of these men and women in the African continent. Ultimately, Freedom’s Horizon shows that Brazilian abolitionism was unapologetically Black, African, urban, and rural. Beyond parliamentary activities, this anti-slavery movement was also internationalist and shaped by the activities of insurgents who organized slave revolts, escaped bondage, and also joined maroon communities. Richly researched and powerfully argued, Freedom’s Horizon is successful in offering a multidimensional view of Black Brazilian abolitionism as a movement for self-emancipation. An excellent contribution to the historiography of emancipation in the Americas, the book will spark discussions in graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of slavery, the Atlantic world, and the African diaspora.