Muslims have been settling and integrating in Brazilian colonial, slaveholding, and democratic societies for almost half a millennium. The chronicles of Islam in Brazil and its enduring heritage are less defined and more unknown to many audiences. Greater scholarly attention is needed, not only to enrich and develop the study of Islam in Brazil but also to better disseminate the premise that Islam is not new to Brazil, as previously thought. In the early 21st century, although only 0.09 percent of the total population, Muslims have become an integral part of the multicultural landscape of modern-day Brazil. Despite the small numbers, studies have shown that for five hundred years Islam has been present, forgotten, revived, and reclaimed in the chronicles of colonial and contemporary Brazil. Thematically and chronologically, Islam took shape in Terra do Brasil during four time periods spanning over five centuries of distinctive historical, social, political, and cultural contexts. Islam in Brazil—and the Americas as a whole—follows four different historical moments: pre-Columbian and early colonial contacts, the transatlantic slave trade, Arab immigration, and conversion to Islam.
Article
Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida
A variety of indigenous peoples active in the backlands and villages of monarchic Brazil presented challenges to the policy of building a national state. The implementation of an indigenist policy that sought to assimilate and incorporate indigenous people as citizens and workers for the Empire was widely debated by politicians and intellectuals who developed different images and political projects for indigenous peoples in accordance with their varying degrees of sociocultural insertion in the various provinces of the Empire. Natives in the backlands were portrayed as savages for whom just wars and enslavement were an appropriate response to any who resisted being assigned to settlements or military bases, while it was proposed that natives in the settled areas be assimilated and their collective lands and aldeias (indigenous villages) be dissolved. Abuse, irregularities, violence, ill-treatment, illegal enslavement, and intensive exploitation of Indian labor by colonists, public authorities, and priests were widely denounced throughout the various regions of the Empire. Indians acted and reacted in a variety of ways, ranging from confrontation to collaboration: they resorted to both legal battles and armed conflict to defend their rights and their land. They fought vigorously in the non-Indians’ wars, both on the frontiers and in the political movements of the Empire, seeking to extract their own advantages from the alliances they formed. There was intense interaction among backlands Indians, aldeia Indians, and non-Indians, including African-descended slaves and quilombolas, and they circulated among both physical spaces and social categorizations, often crossing borders that separated one from another. Many settled Indians remained in their established aldeias, fighting to preserve them. They resorted to the courts in defense of their communal lives and land, affirming their indigenous identities and contradicting the discourse of politicians and intellectuals who considered them assimilated into the general population and civilized, and thus subject to having their aldeias legally abolished. Current ethnogenesis movements have revealed the fallacy of the belief that Indians disappeared in the 19th century.
Article
Manoel de Oliveira Lima (b. Recife, December 25, 1867–d. Washington DC, March 24, 1928) was one of the most prestigious men of letters of his generation. As a historian, diplomat, literary critic, journalist, writer, and professor, he maintained an intense intellectual activity. His strong and often controversial views galvanized public opinion and gathered as many admirers as detractors. The “Fat Don Quixote” and the “Intellectual Ambassador of Brazil” were at the same time deemed a “Diplomatic Torpedo” with an “incontinent pen.” Lima became a renowned scholar and public speaker thanks to his expertise on Latin American history, especially on the history of Brazil. He was the author of numerous books and articles published in Europe and the Americas, and a lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and the Sorbonne. He was a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His career as a diplomat began in 1891, the same year he married Flora de Oliveira Lima (neé Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, b. Cachoeirinha, October 26, 1863, d. August 12, 1940, Washington, DC), his lifelong companion and collaborator. Together they lived in Portugal, Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Venezuela, and Belgium until his retirement. A devoted bibliophile, Oliveira Lima donated his rich collection of rare books, artwork, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and documents from his personal archive to the Catholic University of America in 1916. In 1920, he established residence in Washington, DC to oversee the organization of the university’s library, which was inaugurated in 1924. He taught international law and acted as librarian at CUA until his death in 1928. The Oliveira Lima Library (OLL) is currently considered one of the finest collections of Luso-Brazilian materials and one of the most important Brasilianas in the world.
Article
Luiz Geraldo Silva
Existing in the 16th and 17th centuries and located in the captaincy of Pernambuco, in the Northeast of Brazil, the quilombo of Palmares was one of most vigorous and complex societies formed by fugitive slaves in the Americas. Its size, longevity, and the intensity of the war that marked its collapse in 1694 can only be compared to events of a similar nature that took place in Jamaica and Suriname, the Maroon War (1728–1739) and the Saramaka War (1749–1762), respectively. While these were concluded in peace treaties between colonial governments and fugitive slaves, Palmares had a different outcome. Its historic dynamics were associated with three interdependent dimensions. The first refers to the formation and social dimension of both the plantation economy and the traffic of African slaves to Brazil, which explains the nature, social existence, and density of social groups who formed and maintained Palmares quilombo for more than a century. The second dimension is related to the transformations over successive generations of its institutions and balance of power, from which there resulted a political structure based on lineage and the African concept of rights-in-persons. The third dimension is related to the relations of power between the leaders of Palmares and agents of the Portuguese monarchy, who sought to undermine that political structure and to take advantage of the tensions between the lineages existing in the quilombo.
Article
Francisco Doratioto
In 1863 and 1864, historical and political contradictions in the River Plate region led to civil war in Uruguay, creating tensions with neighboring nations in the region. The Brazilian government intervened both politically and militarily in Uruguay to address the interests of ranchers in its province of Rio Grande do Sul, to distract the attention of the Brazilian citizens from domestic problems, and to preserve the political influence of the Empire of Brazil on Uruguay. This action by the Empire clashed with the new Paraguayan policy of political interference in the River Plate region and resulted in the declaration of war against Brazil by Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López. This conflict broadened into the Paraguayan War.
Article
Wilma Peres Costa
The effort of searching the effects of the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay on the building up of Brazilian national identity challenges the historian with a paradox: why the military victory promotes the fall of the political regime instead of strengthening it. The article tries to deal with some dimensions of this paradox underlining the distinctive characteristics of this war in the ongoing warmongering in the Platine region—the huge numbers of conscripted soldiers (“the Total War”), the hybrid political character of the alliance (Brazilian monarchy and Argentinian Republic), the opposition of most of the conservative classes, and the unveiling of slavery as a strategic weakness for the country—are some of the themes treated in order to explain how the empire lost both the battle of worldwide moral support and the battle of legitimacy inside the country. The massive recruitment coming from all parts of the country could bring the empowerment of ordinary people in the postwar decades, but the monarchical elites took careful steps to ensure that these sectors were quickly demobilized and also not to receive medals and other military honors. The postwar era was one of unfolding of an endemic crisis leading to contest of monarchical institutions. They came from military sectors, but also from regional elites, besides bitter criticism from middle-class intellectuals. Racial arguments filled an outstanding part in this period, leading to the giving prestige of “scientific” racism and the negative diagnosis for the future of a modern nation founded in a racially mixed society.
Article
R. Andrew Chesnut and Kate Kingsbury
Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in the 1500s, and an integral part of conquest and colonization was missionary activity by Catholic clergy. Brazil, like all of Latin America, was Catholic for over four hundred years. However, in the early 1900s, missionaries from overseas came to Brazil extolling a new faith, known as Pentecostalism, that had its origins in the United States. This creed consisted of a charismatic Protestant movement that focused on baptism in the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal churches, originally founded by outsiders, soon began to burgeon under Brazilian leaders. Pentecostalism mushroomed in a brief span of time, proliferating across the nation and gaining popularity among immiserated urban dwellers. It has proven so popular among Brazilians that it has resulted in the pentecostalization of Christianity, in which the Charismatic Renewal has become the predominant form of Catholicism as the Church has struggled to compete with Pentecostalism over the past few decades.
There are numerous notable denominations that boast millions of members, such as the Four-Square Gospel, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and Assemblies of God. These churches proffer a range of religious products to the urban poor, ranging from Prosperity Theology to faith healing. Impoverished city dwellers, faced with limited opportunities and denied access to basic human needs, nevertheless seek to navigate the difficulties of their daily lives. Faced with somatic diseases and social distress, many seek sacred succor to surmount their troubles. This may lead them to the door of a Pentecostal church, where they are promised miracles and healing in exchange for steadfast piety and generous tithing. Many find empowerment through conversion and catharsis during spirited services, where they imagine that through sacred power they might be freed from material deprivation. Pentecostal leaders, such as Edir Macedo, a billionaire bishop, have acquired not only significant capital but also great influence over their congregants. Such is their sway on the vox populi that political leaders have sought the support of Pentecostal clergy to further their ambitions, such as the recently elected president Jair Bolsonaro, who won thanks to the Evangelical vote.
Article
The Second Reign (1840–1889), the monarchic times under the rule of D. Pedro II, had two political parties. The Conservative Party was the cornerstone of the regime, defending political and social institutions, including slavery. The Liberal Party, the weaker player, adopted a reformist agenda, placing slavery in debate in 1864.
Although the Liberal Party had the majority in the House, the Conservative Party achieved the government, in 1868, and dropped the slavery discussion apart from the parliamentary agenda. The Liberals protested in the public space against the coup d’état, and one of its factions joined political outsiders, which gave birth to a Republic Party in 1870. In 1871, the Conservative Party also split, when its moderate faction passed a Free Womb bill. In the 1880s, the Liberal and Conservative Parties attacked each other and fought their inner battles, mostly around the abolition of slavery.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party grew, gathering the new generation of modernizing social groups without voices in the political institutions. This politically marginalized young men joined the public debate in the 1870s organizing a reformist movement. They fought the core of Empire tradition (a set of legitimizing ideas and political institutions) by appropriating two main foreign intellectual schemes. One was the French “scientific politics,” which helped them to built a diagnosis of Brazil as a “backward country in the March of Civilization,” a sentence repeated in many books and articles. The other was the Portuguese thesis of colonial decadence that helped the reformist movement to announce a coming crisis of the Brazilian colonial legacy—slavery, monarchy, latifundia. Reformism contested the status quo institutions, values, and practices, while conceiving a civilized future for the nation as based on secularization, free labor, and inclusive political institutions. However, it avoided theories of revolution. It was a modernizing, albeit not a democrat, movement.
Reformism was an umbrella movement, under which two other movements, the Abolitionist and the Republican ones, lived mostly together. The unity split just after the shared issue of the abolition of slavery became law in 1888, following two decades of public mobilization. Then, most of the reformists joined the Republican Party.
In 1888 and 1889, street mobilization was intense and the political system failed to respond. Monarchy neither solved the political representation claims, nor attended to the claims for modernization. Unsatisfied with abolition format, most of the abolitionists (the law excluded rights for former slaves) and pro-slavery politicians (there was no compensation) joined the Republican Party. Even politicians loyal to the monarchy divided around the dynastic succession. Hence, the civil–military coup that put an end to the Empire on November 15, 1889, did not come as a surprise. The Republican Party and most of the reformist movement members joined the army, and many of the Empire politician leaders endorsed the Republic without resistance.
A new political–intellectual alignment then emerged. While the republicans preserved the frame “Empire = decadence/Republic = progress,” monarchists inverted it, presenting the Empire as an era of civilization and the Republic as the rule of barbarians. Monarchists lost the political battle; nevertheless, they won the symbolic war, their narrative dominated the historiography for decades, and it is still the most common view shared among Brazilians.
Article
K. E. Goldschmitt and Eduardo Vicente
The period following the end of Getúlio Vargas’s second government (1951–1954) saw a massive expansion of the media industries, with popular music in particular becoming an important cultural touchstone. A major feature of the postwar period was the politicization of music and other media such as radio, television, and social media. Other salient trends include the incorporation of international musical influences (especially jazz, rock, and countercultural postures) into Brazilian musical production starting in the late-1950s, and the rise and prominence of regional genres in the national discourse. Along with the fluctuations in the national economy, the recording industry expanded and contracted. Brazilian media industry infrastructures have taken part in artistic expression, including both major multinational record labels as well as independent record companies. Popular music production has regularly responded to the social and economic upheavals that have characterized Brazil since the end of World War II, including the military dictatorship (1964–1985). While much of the international reputation of Brazilian music in this period relies on the popularity of bossa nova, the history of the country’s media industries shows how other genres such as música popular brasileira, rock, brega, and sertanejo adapted to public tastes. Even during the height of the military regime’s repression, the efforts of record companies and recording artists saw the expansion of Brazilian popular music into still more diverse sounds, a trend that continued through the first decades of the 21st century. Interdisciplinary perspectives, including communication studies, history, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, show some possible new routes for music and cultural industry research in Brazil.
Article
Carlos Sandroni
Commercial recordings in Brazil were first made in 1902 in Rio de Janeiro. During the first two decades of the 20th century, however, the recorded repertoire centered around the same musical genres established in the final decades of the previous century: for sung music, this meant modinhas, lundus, waltzes, and cançonetas; for instrumental music, this meant polkas, maxixes, marches, and tangos. During this period, sheet music for pianos and musical bands played a greater role in disseminating popular music than did mechanical recordings. This included dissemination by the medium of radio, which had begun in the country in the early 1920s but only expanded when its commercial operation was authorized in the 1930s. Of the leading musical genres of the period, samba and carnival marches (always sung) came into their own during the 1930s. Rio de Janeiro, at that time the capital of the republic, the cradle of the burgeoning phonograph recording industry, and the center of the still extant sheet music publishing business and radio broadcasting, is key to understanding Brazilian popular music of the time. During the entire period, however, migrants from other regions, especially from the northeastern states of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Ceará, made crucial contributions to popular music. These contributions became particularly significant during the final years of that decade with the success of baião, a sung musical genre with a distinct northeastern flavor whose influence would stretch into the 1950s.
Article
Laura de Mello e Souza
Popular religiosity in colonial Brazil was marked by the process of colonization, which placed populations of differing ethnic and cultural origins together in dynamic and conflicting ways. On the one hand, the lived experiences of these various populations reflected the beliefs of their continent of origin: Europe, Africa, and America. On the other hand, they were unavoidably intertwined, giving rise to novel forms of religious practice. Heterodox behaviors were notable from the beginning of colonization, adding to the peculiarities of the slave system that constituted colonial life and defined its social relations. In a vast territory over which the surveillance and control of religious institutions—both ecclesiastical and inquisitorial—proved unworkable, daily experiences of religiosity became increasingly distinct from the more dogmatic and “official” traits sustained by the Catholic Church. A particular type of religiosity, as heterodox and mixed as the population itself, took shape within the limits of Catholicism while continuously escaping its confines. Catholicism endured from the earliest times as the guiding orientation of Brazil, supported by the Crown as well as regular and secular clergy alike. The education of the elites was Catholic, and many of the earliest writings about the new land of Brazil came from the quills of the pious, producing foundational images marked by religious metaphors. For these reasons, popular religiosity reveals a great deal about the nature of Brazilian culture, and it is necessary to analyze it within the context of broader dynamics that define popular beliefs that do not always fit within the orthodox guidelines of official Catholicism and erudition.
Article
Monica Duarte Dantas
Scholars have long studied the rebellious movements that rattled Brazil after its independence and during the so-called Regency period. The scholarship has mainly focused on understanding the political and economic elites who led the revolts by joining or fighting the rebels, or whose interests were at stake. Comparatively little attention has been paid to those who actually fought in the battles: namely, the impoverished free and freed people who comprised the majority of the country’s population. These women and men took up arms and, occasionally, led the rebellions, notably during the First Reign and the Regency. Historical accounts of such revolts are limited, however, and those that speak to upheavals that occurred from the 1850s on are even scarcer.
In the past decades, new interpretations of popular revolts during the Empire have enabled scholars to reappraise how free and freed poor (of Portuguese, African, or Native American descent) experienced the innovations brought by the country’s independence, and the long process of state-building.
Even if the country’s Charta was given by the first emperor, and not duly written and approved by a legislative body, it followed quite strictly the liberal creed that inspired so many other contemporary constitutions. According to the 1824 Charta, all of the country’s natural born were henceforth made citizens, regardless of whether they were free or freed, with constitutionally guaranteed rights. Although one should never mistake the letter of the law for its actual enforcement, its existence should also not be dismissed.
This is especially important when trying to understand the history of a country whose elites kept on fighting not only over the Constitution’s true meaning, but also over governmental control. Battling for independence and state power meant publicizing mottos about freedom, emancipation, the people’s rights, and the overcoming of oppression across the country—words that were spoken out loud and printed in newspapers and gazettes, reaching as far as the Brazilian backlands.
One must always factor into any historical equation the specifics of a country’s population. By the time Brazil became independent, slaves amounted to roughly 31 percent of the population, where most of the remaining 69 percent were composed of free poor, freed people, and “domesticated” Indians; all of whom became citizens when the 1824 Charta was enforced (with constitutional Rights, according to the law, and even, depending on one’s gender, age, income, and status—as a free or a freed man—to vote and be voted).
Considering all those specifics, this article analyzes the involvement of free and freed peoples in 19th century rebellions, riots, and seditions; movements that broke out all over the country, rattling regions as far as Maranhão and Rio Grande do Sul, from the 1820s to the 1880s. Regarding the role played by popular revolts in 19th century Brazil, one must go beyond the boundaries set by a traditional historiography to understand how the experience of protesting was directly related to the process of state building, and how the lower strata of society learned to fight for their demands as citizens of a representative constitutional monarchy.
Article
Angela de Castro Gomes
The first decades of the 21st century brought back to the international arena a family of terms well known in Latin America to designate both styles of politics and the leaders who embodied them: populism and populists. Brazil is seen as a paradigmatic example of this type of experience, called “classic populism,” for two periods of its history, corresponding to its process of transition from a “traditional” society to a “modern” economy and society. The first period ran from the 1930 revolution until 1945, with the fall of the Estado Novo and the removal of its “leader,” Getúlio Vargas. The latter period covered the 1950s, “the golden years of populism,” since, despite the socioeconomic development achieved, democracy did not manage to establish itself in the country.
The populist interpretation of this period of Brazilian history was formulated and shared by academia, essentially after the 1964 coup, and was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it extended these frontiers, using the language of the media, political conflicts, and the common sense of Brazilians. Widely used, the concepts of populism and populist were conflated with the events and characters they name, only being critiqued in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the number of scholars seeking other references has grown, whether redrafting the meanings of the original proposal, the case of the “populist political system,” or abandoning it completely, in the example of the “trabalhista pact.” In this dense debate, one constant can be observed: in Brazil populism became a “category of accusation,” translating negative values present in the “other” to whom one is referring. Although many academic studies do not use this pejorative tone, it is so consolidated in Brazilian politics that it has become part of the political culture of parties and trade unions, circulating widely.
Article
Jonas Gregorio de Souza
Continuing advances in the archaeology of the Amazon have changed long-standing misconceptions about the rainforest as a homogeneous, nearly pristine environment occupied by small, scattered groups. Massive archaeological sites, deep deposits of anthropogenic soils, and earthworks found over thousands of kilometers now testify to the scale and intensity of past human impact in some parts of the Amazon. However, debate persists about the extent of such transformations, as distinct environments within the Amazon Basin (floodplains, savannas, seasonal forests) reveal different scales and intensities of pre-Columbian landscape modification. In that context, the discovery of hundreds of geometric earthen enclosures in the southern rim of the Amazon is proving that some areas that were previously considered virtually untouched forest may have been densely settled in the past. Although regional variations exist, most southern Amazonian enclosures appear to be defensive earthworks built at the turn of the second millennium ce, a period recognized by archaeologists as one of escalating population densities, migrations, and warfare across the Amazon Basin.
Article
European empires would have not existed absent private enterprise both licit and illicit. Private traders, in the first instance, sustained colonies by conveying the labor and merchandise that planters required in exchange for the exports that colonies produced. Moreover, those colonies would not have existed in the first place absent private initiatives since European states in the 16th and 17th centuries customarily lacked the administrative and fiscal resources and often the inclination to oversee such projects. Individual or corporate adventurers, though, did possess such resources and inclination; legitimate operators secured government authority for their activities pursuant to charters that drew upon medieval forms and granted extraordinary powers to their recipients. Under the terms of these documents, grantees pursued public purposes—as they would be called today—that their activities entailed in conjunction with their pursuit of profit. The results of this practice included the establishment of colonies that spanned the Atlantic basin from the Madeira Islands to Newfoundland to Brazil; the emergence of colonial leaderships who pursued their own agendas while they ingratiated themselves into trans-Atlantic political cultures; and incessant conflict over territorial and commercial agendas that involved indigenous people as well as Europeans. Other operators did not bother with legitimacy as they pursued smuggling, piracy, and colonizing ventures that also contributed profoundly to imperial expansion. The domestic and international friction generated by these activities ultimately brought increased state involvement in overseas affairs and increased state ability to direct those affairs.
Article
Frederico Freitas
Brazil, the fifth-largest country on earth, has almost a third of its territory classified as protected areas. They include nature reserves with the strictest level of protection and areas reserved for sustainable use. They comprise, in their majority, public lands, but contain a percentage of privately owned estates. They are regulated by a centralized national system of protected areas, but their management is fragmented at all levels of government—federal, state, and municipal. They are located in the sparsely inhabited Brazilian hinterland but can also be found close to the country’s large and densely populated cities. And throughout the years, they have appealed to a diversity of values and policy goals to justify their existence: protection of natural features, development of frontiers, preservation of endangered species and their inhabitants, conservation of biodiversity, sustainability, social justice. All in all, the protected areas of Brazil represent one of the most extensive and ambitious forms of territorial intervention ever implemented in the country.
It was not always like that. With a few exceptions, protected areas controlled by the state for the sake of conserving natural landscapes and resources were mostly absent before the 20th century. It was only in the 1930s that the Vargas regime established the first national parks in Brazil. They were followed by a dozen other parks in the 1950s and 1960s, but up until the 1970s, the establishment of protected areas in Brazil lacked proper planning, institutional support, and policy goals. This situation changed in the mid-1970s, during the height of the military dictatorship, when an alliance of Brazilian and foreign conservationists began pushing for the inclusion of protected areas in Amazonian development programs. The adoption of the language and methods of dictatorship-era territorial planning by the proponents of conservation set the basis for the development of a national system of protected areas. The system took twenty years to be passed into law, a period that coincided with the end of twenty-one years of military dictatorship and the return to democracy in Brazil. One of the novelties of this period was the appearance of groups, such as Amazonian rubber tappers, with a stake in defining conservation policy. They introduced ideas of social justice in the conservation debate, in what came to be known as socio-environmentalism. It was also during the post-dictatorship period that Brazilian conservationism adopted global standards of conservation, for example protection of biodiversity and sustainable development, as justifiable policy goals. In the early 21st century Brazil counts over 2,300 distinct protected areas distributed throughout all of its twenty-six states. They are part of a single, but diverse, national system of protected areas.
Article
Gabriela Pellegrino Soares
The flourishing of the publishing market in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century is associated with the social, economic, and political transformations that accompanied the advent of the republic and, after 1930, the inflections of the so-called Vargas era. Publishers with growing prestige began to create repertoires that could capture the multiple dimensions of the nation and affirm identarian matrices. Through letters, lively soirées, and political complicities, they constituted solid sociability networks, reflected in the names of the authors in their catalogues.
In the presentation and selection of works, they assimilated the impulses of the modernist and regionalist literary movements, revealing talents from various regions of Brazil. They benefited from the expansion of educational policies, the birth of universities, and the maturing of the human sciences. In addition, they made efforts to educate the reading public using rigorously organized collections under the curatorships of renowned writers and bibliophiles. They were aware of the cultural mission they carried out in a country with a still-precarious cultural and educational structure.
Among the many collections which appeared, involving the translation of classics of literature or foreign popular science books, a central place was given to the '(re)discovery of Brazil.' In austere or finely made editions, the Brasilianas (works about Brazil), literary collections, individual works by Brazilian writers, poets, and essayists from different generations, and also foreign perspectives of Brazil all gained materiality.
Echoing the famous phrase by the Paulista writer Monteiro Lobato, “a country that makes men and book,” the publishers of the period acted in a profound connection—even in positions of confrontation—with the ideas of the nation that appeared on the horizon at that time.
Article
Angus Mitchell
The Putumayo atrocities allude to an outrage that made international headlines between 1909 and 1913. The evolving press story drew public attention to the extreme exploitation of people and environment by a British-owned extractive rubber company in a contested region of the northwest/Upper Amazon bordering Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. The scandal contributed to the demise of the “boom” in the extractive rubber industry in the Amazon. Claims of atrocities were brought initially to the attention of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (ASAPS) in London. Humanitarian pressure triggered a series of official investigations undertaken by the governments of Britain, Peru, the United States, and the Vatican. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, dispatched the consul general in Brazil, Roger Casement, to investigate. Casement made two separate journeys into the region in 1910 and 1911. In 1912, a British government Blue Book was published containing his reports and oral testimony gathered from British-Caribbean subjects recruited by the company to act as overseers. This was followed by a parliamentary select committee inquiry held in London that ran from October 1912 to April 1913. The US government organized their own commission of inquiry and published their own report. Despite the acreage of text produced, the efforts to help the rainforest communities proved too little too late. By the time the investigations had been undertaken, and the reports published, the main Indigenous communities living across the territory had been largely worked to death, displaced, or hunted down. In July 1914, an amendment to the Slavery Bill was passed in the British Houses of Parliament requiring transnational companies to assume humane responsibility and care for their workforce in whatever territories they operated. However, as Europe collapsed toward war, the legislation was never enshrined into international law, and this remains one of the unrealized goals of international labor relations to this day. Nevertheless, the Putumayo atrocities endure as the most closely documented and described incidents of the last years of the Amazon rubber boom and allow for consideration of the unfathomable human cost in a particularly vicious moment of untrammeled international colonial capitalism in South America.
Article
Osmundo Pinho
The state of Bahia and its capital, Salvador, are the original loci of European colonization in the territory that later became Brazil. Together with other cities in the Northeast and along the Brazilian coast, they witnessed the imposition of mercantile capitalism and slave labor as forms of production of a new state and society. In the 21st century, Bahia is a state marked by racial inequality, the poverty of a large part of the population, and state violence, paradoxically associated with the strong presence of traditions of African origin and a rich and dense popular cultural life, as in other parts of the African diaspora. This combination implies certain contradictions experienced in different fields, in the present social structure and in the cultural and political history of the region. This can be seen in the trajectory of carnival, the most important popular festival in the city, and in its successive moments of identity reinvention as well as in the constitution of the city’s landscape, marked by black and African presence in symbolic and material ways. It can also be seen in the historical formation of candomblé, the cult of Yoruban gods in Bahia, developed amid persecutions and disputes. All these dimensions are structured in the expressive cultural forms of a black culture, which has been made and remade by generations of Afro-descendants in this environment marked by inequality, but also by creativity, joy, and aesthetic power.
Article
Marcelo Paixão
Several voices inside and outside Brazil define it as a racial democracy—that is, a nation without segregation or rigid boundaries separating the different groups of race and color. This understanding interacts with issues like nationality and a positive image that this nation conveys for itself worldwide as a land of cordiality, happiness, and racial integration. More than origin, personal appearance is the basis of social interactions. Society can identify a continuum of hues of skin color among its individuals who are racially classified according to their social class and the social spaces in which they interact. However, it does not mean that the social prestige assigned to an individual’s skin color is neutral. The literature shows that the pattern of race relations in Brazil is characteristically ambiguous, based on constant racial prejudice and discrimination against the Afro-Brazilian population while systematically denying its existence. As such, Brazil’s individuals have an asymmetrical standard of social acceptance and access to economic, political, and symbolic power, based on their physical features, including their skin color, their hair type, and the shape or size of their lips and nose. Despite methodological complexities, several research pieces from 1990–2020 confirm that a racial hierarchy system exists in Brazil and that racial injustice, violence, and inequality are prevalent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Brazil has implemented comprehensive social policies to combat poverty and affirmative action policies that target Afro-Brazilian individuals in an effort to improve the quality of the lives of Brazil’s poorest citizens. Nevertheless, these endeavors were not enough to overcome the consequences of a long historical period of slavery, discrimination, and racial injustice.
