Dutra's World is an engaging socioeconomic history of wealth in nineteenth-century Brazil. Its central argument, that slaveholding was the principal means of wealth accumulation, is centered on the striking personal case of Antonio Dutra. Dutra was an African slave turned freedman who accumulated a substantial estate by the time of his death in 1849, thanks to his acquisition of 13 slaves to work in his barbering and musician businesses and to serve him at home. Zephyr Frank argues that upward social mobility like Dutra's was possible and even widespread in Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of the nineteenth century because of a dramatic increase in slave imports, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. This hoarding in the face of increased British pressure to end the slave trade made slaves cheap and therefore affordable to Rio de Janeiro's “middling sorts,” a vast group that extended from professionals and government employees at the top to widows and day laborers at the bottom. Frank's analysis of death inventories across the nineteenth century confirms that urban middle groups experienced rising levels of wealth up to 1850 generated by these returns from investing in slaves.

The unusual window of economic opportunity and mobility closed abruptly with the abolition of the international slave trade in 1850. Prices doubled once no new stocks of slaves were available, putting slave purchases out of the reach of the middle groups.

Alternatives to investing in slaves were few and the most common of these, real estate, was expensive relative to slaveholding. This was true in the first half of the century and truer in the second, when immigrant inflows strained Rio's housing supply. The rise in slave and real estate prices after 1850 left the middling groups with few income-generating assets, thereby curtailing their ability to accumulate wealth. As a result, the second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by increasing wealth concentration in the hands of the elite and an ever widening economic gap between elite and middle groups. The irony of this relationship is not hard to grasp: the impressment of hundreds of thousands of Africans may have offered Brazil its best chance at broad-based wealth accumulation and, therefore, balanced socioeconomic development. The abolition of an abhorrent trade put an end to socioeconomic mobility and generated a chasm between the elite and the rest that has persisted to this day.

Frank's findings are the result of archival research into estate inventories throughout the nineteenth century, an ambitious undertaking of data compilation and analysis. Although Frank's argument is both well-documented and compelling, the reader must bear in mind that it captures the experiences of a slim fraction of the Brazilian population. Urban dwellers comprised 6 to 8 percent of Brazil's nineteenth-century population at most; slaves made up half of those urban dwellers. Social mobility via wealth accumulation, then, was limited to a relatively small group. Still, Frank's findings for urban Rio are powerful. They capture an important group not often studied—middle groups in Brazilian economy and society—and therefore provide an important counterpoint to the predominant interpretations of nineteenth-century Brazil in which the hierarchical, patriarchal social structure shut down any possibilities for social mobility. Like recent explorations of Brazil's rural economy that have revealed the prevalence of slaveholding among small producers, this book is a clear demonstration of how central slaveholding was to wealth accumulation for these modest middle groups.

Although this book is interesting on many fronts—occupation of urban space; consumption habits of urban dwellers; investment strategies of the rich and poor; economic position of women in family and society—its organization creates a degree of frustration for the reader. Frank makes Dutra's experience the touchstone for the broader analysis of major shifts in Rio de Janeiro's economy and society, referring to him throughout the book's first chapters as if we have already become well acquainted with his life, but does not discuss Dutra's inventory or analyze his family's economy until late in the book. Frank wants to establish the arc of urban investment and wealth holding across the century before entering into the specifics of the Dutra inventory that captures just a portion of that arc, but this organization leaves the non-Brazilianist without a detailed description of sources and methodology or a grounding in inheritance law—the fundamental institution affecting wealth holding over time—until chapter 6. In this era of MP3 downloads, the reader might want to make his or her own “mix,” reading about Dutra first (chapter 6 “Death and Dying”) and then reading the chapters that demonstrate changes in the economy and society over time.

Dutra's World is an accessible book that can be used in an undergraduate class but will also be of interest to scholars interested in wealth holding, urbanization, slavery, family, and gender in the nineteenth century. Frank is candid about both the potential and limitations of his sources, generally satisfying within a matter of sentences the doubts that occur to the critical mind regarding data, method, and interpretation. More systematic explanations of his data and methodology are contained in an appendix to the book, an arrangement that does not tax the general reader and addresses the interests of the specialist. This book will appeal to both.