When Brazilians became citizens of a nation rather than vassals of a global kingdom, they experienced less change in their interaction with the government than we might expect. Brazil’s independence was nearly ensured when the last foreign troops and mercenaries left Montevideo in 1824. King Pedro I swore to a new constitution. Symbols of the new nation appeared in the most distant places, including five national days of festivity declared in 1826. Yet the constitution provided only 95 words to define the duties of hundreds of municipalities that stretched across much of the continent of South America. These jurisdictional zones of small or immense rural areas with a village or city courthouse provided the institutions of the most personal and immediate interaction with Brazil’s voting citizens or its much larger body of dependents and “second citizens” (slaves, females, freed Africans). A more significant change came about a decade after the end of colonial rule when a municipal regulatory law (1828) and a constitutional amendment (1834) created the modern Brazilian municipality. These laws also formalized a century-old process that had begun transferring the responsibility of many different goods and services from the family, the largesse of the noble, an agreement of a collective, and the Christian church to a narrowly representative and local government. What was private—or unprovided—became public. By the second half of the nineteenth century, and after a revolution in 1889 that sent King Pedro II into exile, the growing length and variety of municipal ordinances reflect a dramatically reconfiguring relationship between citizens or dependent residents and the state. In considering expectations and impact on ordinary people’s day-to-day lives, changes at the municipal and provincial levels were arguably more important than the political events that usually delineate the chapters of textbooks on Brazil’s Empire (1822–1889) and First Republic (1889–1930).

By examining and comparing a set of São Paulo municipalities, and by denying a sharp line between the imperial and republican periods, Anne Hanley’s book provides intriguing new clues to one of Brazil’s most vexing questions: Why did its people experience relatively more political instability and economic problems after independence? Two decades ago, Stephen Haber (Hanley’s doctoral advisor) put it more controversially as “Why did Latin America fall behind?” Hanley is careful to measure Brazil’s “flawed” social and economic development in its enormous inequality and to restrict her argument to the state of São Paulo. Nevertheless, she provides a hypothesis that institutional weakness, and especially enormous deficiencies in municipal public finance, delayed “human development.” Instead, its wealthiest citizens reaped the rewards from public investments.

Hanley provides the context and evidence for this argument throughout eight chapters. The first half of the book examines the lack of stable and sufficient sources of money, concluding “the government with the greatest responsibility for the public good had the fewest resources to invest in the attendant services” (p. 23). Three chapters (2, 3, and 4) discuss the changing legal and jurisdictional position of the municipality, fiscal structure of the Brazilian state, and the condition of local coffers of Paulista municipalities that went from wild frontiers to coffee boomtowns. Using municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints and requests, council correspondence, and financial statements, Hanley argues that municipalities failed at their mandates. Their failure was less ineptitude or corruption than unceasingly dire financial straits. The second half of the book turns to municipal spending, again dividing this section into three chapters. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on categories of public goods: urbanization, public works and infrastructure, public health and hygiene, education, beautification, and spaces of leisure. These chapters document the rise of Brazil’s “fiscal state,” in which a bizarre or dangerous idea that the state’s primary job is to foster the well-being of its citizens became the commonsensical idea we know today. Hanley briefly mentions smallpox vaccination as an example, but Brazil began controlling this heinous disease more than eight decades after other nations of the Atlantic. The hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by a disease proven to be preventable by the middle of the nineteenth century are further testament to the fiscal weakness of the level of government that mattered most to Brazilians.

Hanley compels historians to revisit the most important questions regarding Brazilian history. Why such relatively low rates of growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Why such political instability? And, why such inequality, both individual and regional? Hanley, a meticulous historian, provides new, intriguing clues and convincing evidence, but also a few missed opportunities. For example, her selection of case studies covers only the temperate highlands where coffee and railroads extended, but no coastal municipalities. São Paulo’s coast is tropical, had produced sugar for world markets when colonized, and its municipalities were wealthier and more powerful than most interior townships until the nineteenth century. Therefore, a few townships, such as São Sebastião or Ilha Bela, if used as proxies, might give us insight into why the tropical, sugar-growing and immense Northeastern coast of Brazil went from wealth to relative poverty mostly during the period this book studies. In addition, more credit and attention is owed to fine studies, such as Stanley Stein’s Vassouras, which have shown how to write Brazil’s history from the vantage point of a municipal resident. Without much focus on the financial position and actions of the provincial government, we cannot judge if or when municipal weakness was tempered or ameliorated. For example, while the republican regime “decentralized” power in the early 1890s, the provincial governments were quick to centralize some important duties. The first Republican state to effectively vaccinate and control smallpox was São Paulo, which did so through coordinated efforts at the provincial level. Therefore, we cannot understand the municipality fully without better grasping the provincial government’s parallel and complementary metamorphosis. These objections aside, Hanley’s book will be of interest to historians, economists, and political scientists, and many topics, such as the ways that municipal ordinances created an ideal elite vision of life from butcher shops to vagrants will fascinate undergraduates and any curious aficionado of Brazilian history. Finally, this book adds an important chapter to the global history of the origins and rise of the fiscal state.