Yuko Miki successfully proves that contests over Afro-Brazilian and indigenous citizenship on Brazil's Atlantic frontier were as significant as those taking place in its imperial core. Just as both groups were granted an incomplete and precarious citizenship in Brazil's first national constitution of 1824, their enslavement expanded on the unsettled regions located between Espírito Santo and southern Bahia. Building on the scholarship of Alida Metcalf, Hal Langfur, and others who saw this frontier as deepening racial and class inequality in Brazil, Miki portrays it as a key arena for the production and reproduction of the violence that indigenous and African Brazilians experienced during the nineteenth century. “State and frontier converged,” in her own words, “in creating quasi-citizens” to be used as forced laborers by white and mixed-race colonists (62).

Miki's analysis is a penetrating and enlightening one. She illuminates the paradoxical expansion of black and Indian slavery right after the failed 1831 attempts at outlawing the transatlantic slave trade and indigenous slavery, respectively. The agricultural settlement of Colônia Leopoldina, for example, was conceived as a model colony for free labor and European colonization, but gradually it became a center of enslaved labor in the region. Analogously, the outlawing of all forms of indigenous enslavement in 1831 was but a legal fiction that resulted in the infamous enslavement of large numbers of kurukas, or Indian children. Naturally, both Indians and slaves wrestled with frontier violence and shaped the deployment of the state in this region by developing forms of popular royalism (resorting to the Emperor to legitimize a revolt), seeking individual mobility, practicing ethnic soldiering, or finding spaces of empowerment in religion.

This book also illuminates political and intellectual debates around the idea of Brazil as a nation of mestiçagem, the miscegenation of Portuguese, African, and indigenous individuals. As this idea gradually became a component of Brazilianness during the constitutional debates of the 1820s and the intellectual conversations of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico in the 1840s, national elites demanded that Indians be assimilated to western ways as a precondition to becoming Brazilians. In this sense, miscegenation did not produce harmonic race relations, as proponents of the myth of racial democracy would later argue; rather, it prevented real Indians from becoming citizens. They were romanticized and reimagined in romantic Indianist novels. In 1872, the national census counted Indians as caboclos (mixed-race peasants), effectively barring them from citizenship and mistakenly declaring them extinct.

As Indians experienced a growing legal and political exclusion in the mid to late 1800s, Afro-Brazilians moved closer to citizenship due to the gradual process of abolition. After 1850, the Brazilian state opened more juridical opportunities for Afro-Brazilians to liberate themselves from slavery, leading to forms of freedom that, far from being clear and straightforward, were often uncertain, ambivalent, and precarious—and that in the frontier overlapped with conflicts over land, space, and colonization. Masterfully discussed in the book, both the 1889 freed people revolt in Colônia Leopoldina and the 1893 Indian revolt of Itambacuri attest to this fact.

The book proves that, as Peter Wade once argued, “to sustain itself, the nation feeds on the power of blacks and Indians, just as they feed on the power of the nation-state.” Although the reader sometimes wishes that Miki had relied more often on the analytical perspective of space, the study brilliantly illuminates previously understudied connections, such as the importance of events on the frontier to imperial politics and the parallel history of Black and Indian gradual abolition, including the simultaneous illegal enslavement of both groups and their divergent relations with the nation-state as the century progressed. The result is a unique and enlightening study of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous Brazilian social and political history in a frontier region, at a time when Brazil was laying the groundwork for its post-independence history.