British Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Business, Culture, and Identity in Bahia, 1808-1850

Bibliographic Data

ID2833807
AuthorsMagdalena Candioti (0000-0001-8723-6750, Universidad Nacional de San Martín / CONICET, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume86
Issue1
Pages178-179
Publication date2006-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-86-1-178
OpenAlexW2104672462
LanguageEN
Citations received10

In this book, Louise H. Guenther examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the process of constructing Great Britain’s economic and political hegemony over Brazil in the nineteenth century. The author’s case-study approach focuses on social relationships “on the ground”; in doing this, she seeks to restore the uncertainties experienced by the main agents of British imperialism. British merchants’ lives in Bahia between 1808 and 1850 were not as easy and predictable as traditionally thought. Their relationship with the Portuguese and Brazilian governments was far from clear and necessarily privileged — as dependency theory has stated — and was constructed and constantly renegotiated on an almost daily basis.After describing British commercial and political influence in Bahia, the book shows that British merchants were, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a highly heterogeneous group. The creation of the “community” was a deliberate cultural strategy that presumed a combination of self-isolation and little adaptation to local practices and physical conditions. The author argues that the construction and maintenance of a sometimes overacted “Britishness” — by “distancing and defining one another as fundamentally separate along finer and finer gradients” (p. 103) — was vital to enhance the chances of commercial success as well as to create a safer milieu. These foreign Protestant merchants needed to gain social legitimacy and trustworthiness in the new, Catholic setting. Women, as mediators between the two societies, played a central role in this strategy that looked both outward and inward. Such strategy was meant to make the British appear respectable to Brazilians “at the same time it served to remind them of their own identity as different, reifying their separateness in a manner almost perversely positive” (p. 66). Gardens, home architecture and decoration, public and private lifestyle, child-rearing patterns, entertainment, and clothing reveal a strong resistance to adapt to the local climate and social mores. Guenther reconstructs how those men and women paid, with their health and even with their lives, for such efforts to remain separate from the host society. They were unable to see that, paradoxically, their health problems — considered to endanger the success of the enterprise overall — were not a consequence of the environmental conditions but of their nonadaptive behavior.The attachment to British identity, however, did not imply the existence of an identification between the expatriate group and British government interests. For example, while the British government was on a worldwide crusade to end the African slave trade, many Britons in Brazil were deeply involved in financing this trade, and not a few owned slaves. Another example is the ambiguous position of the British consul in Bahia: a resident who belonged to the foreign community and had a key role in its symbolic cohesion but at the same time was charged with representing and enforcing overseas policies not always favorable to his community. Through the detailed analysis of the consul, especially on the difficult conjuncture of independence, Guenther demonstrates efficiently the centrality of improvisation in the construction of the empire and its dependence upon individual interventions.Louise Guenther uses two different sets of primary sources to ground her arguments. The first part of the book references a variety of documents — such as correspondence between the British consul and the president of Bahia, listings of petitioners for residency and citizenship, tombstone inscriptions, and vital records — to account for governmental relationships as well as demographic and intermarriage patterns. When she later seeks to reconstruct broader social representations, she draws on British travel narratives from Brazil. Her treatment of these sources is less convincing. Although she recognizes these travel accounts were permeated with personal prejudices and ethnocentric judgments, she overlooks the preexisting models and perception of reality that are peculiar to this literary genre. As Adolfo Prieto has demonstrated in Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura Argentina, 1808 – 1850 (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), these models give shape to the statements about, and the interpretation of, alien societies.The book relies heavily upon secondary sources in its discussion of Brazilian perspectives on the British presence in Bahia. Here, the author sometimes risks broad generalizations about the “Brazilian” nature of social attitudes and cultural views, forgetting that for the first half of the nineteenth century, social, racial, and enormous regional differences made it difficult to talk about “Brazilians”: the nation as the main cultural and political identity was not yet a fact but only a project. The same lack of problematization of “being Brazilian” sometimes leads her to mix carioca sources to ground arguments about the British community in Bahia.This is a valuable text for world business historians because it helps to debunk some still-current myths about the features of the first global economy, by giving a more complex and dynamic view of this historical process and its contingent character. It will also be an important contribution for further comparative research of British travelers’ studies and British communities all over the world

Aesthetics · Distancing · Economics · Economy · Hegemony · Identity (music · Legitimacy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History of Colonial Brazil · Law

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