One of the most enduring aspects of daily life in modern Brazil, the jogo do bicho (animal game) is an informal lottery that has always existed at – or just beyond – the margin of legitimacy. Created as a means of funding the maintenance of a zoo in Rio de Janeiro, the game quickly ‘escaped’ into the city. There it became a simple practice in which players can bet on any of 25 animals, each of which is identified with four numbers; these numbers, in turn, are linked to the last four digits of the official national lottery. As it transformed into this common form of daily wagering, it migrated from the realm of top-down urban planning to the much more complicated public spaces of early twentieth-century Rio. In the process, it became part of the realm in which citizens of various class, race, ethnic and gender identities forged working definitions of legality and illegality in commerce, politics and social relations. Despite repeated government attempts to eliminate, or at least regulate, the game – some of which have resulted in the jailing of powerful impresarios of the game (bicheiros) – it became a familiar and widely trusted institution.

By taking on the jogo do bicho, Amy Chazkel has ensured a fascinating topic for her book, with details that will pique the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike. Laws of Chance is much more than a lively story, although its author certainly provides an entertaining revisionist telling of the establishment of the zoo by the Barão de Drummond, and does so without falling into sticky theoretical jargon. It is, instead, one of a small number of recent studies of urban life in twentieth-century Rio that force the reader to reconsider core assumptions about economic and political development in the city. Ambitious in the best sense, Chazkel's work examines the conflictive construction of central features of urban life not only for the poor seeking what would become known as citizenship rights, but also for all members of Rio's population.

A recurring theme in this important and provocative book is the relationship between state agents and private individuals. Chazkel shows that, after all, the jogo do bicho, which began as a government-approved raffle, became the target of state efforts to regulate vast portions of urban dwellers’ existence by the early twentieth century. Here one of the great strengths of Laws of Chance emerges: Chazkel refuses to settle for an all too easy approach pitting an expanding modern state against a resistant popular culture. Indeed, she insists on placing the jogo in a grey area where the agents of state discipline – policemen and judges – often acted in ways contrary to the principles that justified the criminalisation of the game. Anti-jogo campaigns helped transform pervasive, petty wagering schemes into the more unified animal game that persists today. Moreover, as Chazkel argues effectively, the participation of the police in particular was essential to this change. Using rich stories of individual players in the complex geography of the city, she shows that state agents fostered and indeed profited from the jogo do bicho. The creation of the pervasive, illicit game depended on the collaboration of state officials, players, sellers and other actors.

Still more impressive is Chazkel's careful contextualisation of the game. She does not merely examine it as part of an informal economy or a popular culture; rather, she frames the jogo as a particularly successful part of the ‘renegade’ petty commercial sector that characterised Rio in the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, she provocatively draws parallels between the ‘uncontrollable entrepreneurship’ (p. 57) taking place among the poor and that carried out by wealthy men striving to make their fortunes in risky ventures, starting in the so-called Encilhamento (‘unsaddling’) that followed the advent of the republic in 1889. Highlighting the fluidity and risk at play across the socio-economic spectrum, Chazkel argues forcefully for the artificiality – the constructedness – of distinctions between licit and illicit economic activities. At the same time, she notes that the term ‘informal economy’ would not have made sense in this early period, precisely because state efforts to impose a definition of illegal on certain practices amounted to a ‘subtle, juridical transition’ (p. 66).

The wide range of her analysis, moreover, underlines the shortcomings of ‘popular culture’ as an analytical concept. Grounding her assertions in thorough research in court cases, police records and other archival documents, as well as newspapers, legal scholarship and literature of the era, Chazkel demonstrates that the lives of the poor – including their involvement in the jogo do bicho – were varied and inseparable from the actions of other classes and agents of the state (p. 163). With a deft touch, she unpacks well-chosen episodes mentioned in these sources; the result is a sophisticated view of the changing nature of public spaces in Rio during a period of massive urban reform projects. It was, as she notes, modern to be out and about in the new or reconfigured streets and plazas of the city; another element of modernity, however, involved attempts to codify acceptable behaviour in these areas of commerce and leisure.

Chazkel is an extremely thoughtful but by no means timid scholar. In an especially innovative chapter, she insists that the reader consider the material – as well as the more abstractly political and economic – reality in which the game grew and evolved. Money, for instance, was a symbol of financial value but also a physical thing, whether in the form of coins and bills or ledger notations of bets and payments. Money often landed bicheiros in trouble, since police pointed to it as evidence of criminal activity. At the same time, money could be anonymous; those accused who were willing to forswear their wads of cash might well win release or acquittal. This is perhaps a section of the book that calls out for further exploration, but only because what the author has presented is so intriguing. Elsewhere, she suggests that early interactions between the state and members of the poor classes, many of them occurring through the criminal justice system, paved the way for later inclusion of greater collective elements of the population in the nation (p. 250). Her epilogue looks even further forward, outlining the ways in which the jogo do bicho subsidised key elements of mass culture – most notably Carnival celebrations – and ended up being linked to drug trafficking.

Throughout Laws of Chance, Chazkel pushes the reader toward a sophisticated understanding of a modern state that, even as it expanded its regulatory ambitions, never fully pulled away from the realms of life it sought to master. She also keeps our eyes always on the lived experiences of the poor and rich, and on how they negotiated their way within or around the regulations that the state put into place. In its bold approach and refreshingly straightforward style, this book will attract – and benefit – not only historians of Brazil and Latin America but also scholars and students of urban studies, informal economies and the nation-state.