Richard Francis Burton (1821–90) spent nearly four years in Brazil, but his biographers see those years mostly as a minor episode in a much more fruitful career. Marshall C. Eakin challenges this view in Empires and Exploration, where he revisits Burton’s Brazilian travels, retracing his journey in 2022 while also exploring the history of the country Burton encountered. The book combines biography, travelogue, and reflections on how travel writing can help us understand Brazil.
The book systematically covers Burton’s two-volume Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil (1869), moving through Minas Gerais and the Rio das Velhas and São Francisco River valley. It begins with chapters that contextualize Burton’s Brazilian experiences in his turbulent life and in the empire of Pedro II, ending with an epilogue that links the traveler and the country to the present day. Eakin’s own journey gives a second perspective to Burton’s story, from which he reflects on changes over time and the potential and limits of travel writing as a form of historical evidence.
The book is particularly engaging because Eakin’s extensive experience in Brazil provides him with rare access to key sources. His discussion of the St. John d’el Rey Mining Company, which he first encountered early in his career, contextualizes Burton’s observations within the broader history of slavery and mining in nineteenth-century Minas Gerais. Eakin also reveals how Isabel Burton (née Arundell, 1831–96) influenced the final text by editing her husband’s manuscript and prefacing it with an objection to his anti-Catholic asides. Eakin argues that Burton’s hypermasculine imperial gaze reaches us reframed by Isabel.
Eakin’s work prompts us to rethink how we view the Brazilian state in the nineteenth century. While the book highlights regional fragmentation in the 1860s and the power gap between the interior and Rio de Janeiro, its argument might have gained from a more thorough examination of the subtle yet persistent forms of state presence that Burton himself observed. Recent research on provincial administration, the armed forces, and other state agencies could have added more complex layers to a simple picture of a divided interior in contrast to a growing national state. But rather than a flaw, this suggests an opportunity to integrate Eakin’s thoughtful analysis of Burton’s work into a broader historiography of imperial governance.
Empires and Exploration acknowledges the difficulty of uncovering the experiences of the enslaved and often focuses on gaps in the archive. At the same time, some of the sources collected by the author might have opened windows onto personal stories. The point matters because the book’s most powerful sections show, in an eye-opening way, how Burton’s observations can be compared with company records and other archival documents. These questions do little to diminish a generous and readable book, though. Eakin writes with the candor of a scholar with a long engagement with Brazil, while recognizing that his own account is also open to scrutiny. His portraits of contemporary Brazil make Empires and Exploration a natural companion to Burton’s volumes and a most valuable contribution to the study of travel writing, empire, and the consolidation of the Brazilian nation.
