Historian Mary Karasch, author of the award-winning Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, has published a new book on the history of central Brazil that promises to be as influential as her first work. It is the result of a decades-long effort to dig deeper into the archives and histories of central Brazil from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Divided into ten chapters and thoroughly supported by appendixes synthesizing historical demographic data, this book not only relies heavily on archival documentation and travel accounts but also makes use of other types of sources such as museum objects and even contemporary religious festivals to tell the history “of one sertão and its peoples” (xxi).
For instance, in Chapter 4, on indigenous warfare and peacemaking, Karasch writes about the Xavante and describes the objects they used in war, using images of such objects from museum collections, notably the J. B. E. Pohl collection at the Weltmuseum in Vienna. These illustrations complement Pohl's narrative. When writing about the Canoeiro, she mentions the types and quantities of weapons they used and describes them in as much detail as possible, providing an interesting account of Canoeiro use of iron and thereby interpreting interethnic relationships through material culture. In a similar manner, in Chapter 7, the author refers to the congadas festivals in the eighteenth century and in present times when writing about the enslaved African populations in Goiás and their traditions.
The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. The first chapter follows the course of the rivers in the captaincy of Goiás from north to far west, describing villages encountered along the way, mining towns, the peoples who lived on the river banks, and peoples who travelled these routes, such as Jesuits and sertanejos, among others. After this introduction to the geography of central Brazil, the book describes and characterizes the various groups of people who inhabited the region, as well as the different ways they interacted with each other and with the environment around them. As the chapters progress, an increasingly complex picture of life in the colonial sertão starts to emerge.
In this sense, the book is to be praised for bringing to light the lives of otherwise forgotten historical actors. For example, Chapter 9 deals with women and gender relations, showing both the hardships and the choices possible for women in frontier Brazil. Importantly, this chapter sets the scene for the subsequent description of the lives of free people of color in central Brazil in the nineteenth century. In fact, through the use of surviving census data, tax records, and parish records, Karasch manages to counter the traditional historiographical claim about the decadence of central Brazil after Portuguese governors and elite Goianos left the captaincy in the late colonial period. Instead, this book shows how, despite forced labor and continuous violence, enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples, and free people of color constantly challenged Portuguese hegemony in the region, so that the Portuguese crown never really held full control of the area.
Karasch contends convincingly that the concept of frontier, inspired in studies of US expansion and colonization, does not fully capture the complexity of social interactions in central Brazil over centuries. Her book proposes a model of historical inquiry in which the dynamics of social and economic transformations in the Brazilian sertão are captured through demographic and fiscal data contrasted with travel narratives, and to a lesser but not less important extent, art and material culture. Thoroughly researched, well-documented, and clearly written, the book deserves to be translated into Portuguese so that it can become more easily accessible to Brazilian scholars and history students alike.
