American Mirror - The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

"In this book, Roberto Saba investigates how the antislavery struggle led Brazil and the United States to cooperate, and how this dynamic collaboration helped establish capitalism and free wage labor as the norm in the Western world. Drawing on overlooked writings from entrepreneurs, scientists, planters, Confederate refugees in Brazil, and journalists, Saba's extensive research reveals that while United States Southerners terrified Brazil with aggressive projects to perpetuate and expand slave labor, reform-minded Brazilians-including slaveholders looked to the American North as a powerful instrument of state- and nation-building. They welcomed advocates from the northern United States who helped them to spread labor-saving machinery, expand large-scale coffee production, advance technical education, diversify economic activities, develop urban centers, and expand transportation infrastructure. Saba shows that the binational collaboration of radical modernizers in the United States and Brazil transformed the political economy of both countries, consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in the Western hemisphere, and laid the groundwork for the demise of Brazilian slavery and the expansion of American capitalism"--

About the author

Roberto Saba

Summary

How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and BrazilIn the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for t

Additional text

"The transition to free and wage labor in Brazil was a complex process with multiple causality, and Saba’s book presents a provocative new understanding of this process. He has made a worthy contribution to the understanding of transnational relations between Brazil and the United States in the age of emancipation."---Mariana Muaze, The Journal of the Civil War Era

Product details

• Authors: Roberto Saba
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2021
• EAN: 9780691190747
• ISBN: 978-0-691-19074-7
• No. of pages: 392
• Series: America in the World
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political theories and the history of ideas; Political Ideologies, Brazil, HISTORY / United States / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Slavery, HISTORY / Latin America / South America, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Capitalism, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, United States of America, USA, Economic systems & structures, History of the Americas, Slavery & abolition of slavery, Slavery and abolition of slavery, HISTORY / Revolutions, Uprisings & Rebellions