Blacks of the Land

Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America

Bibliographic Data

ID2841165
AuthorsStuart B Schwartz (Yale University, corresponding author), Stuart Schwartz (0000-0003-0475-6844, Yale University)
Year2019
Volume99
Issue4
Pages733-735
Publication date2019-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7787280
OpenAlexW2982358041
LanguageEN
Citations received15

This outstanding and beautifully edited monograph grew and matured from John Monteiro's 1985 University of Chicago thesis and was published in Portuguese in 1994. It, and related publications that Monteiro produced (discussed in the afterword) while a professor at the University of Campinas in São Paulo state, had a significant impact on the subsequent study of Brazil's indigenous peoples. He was both part of and a stimulus to a new generation of Brazilian historians and anthropologists who, although influenced by previous studies of indigenous societies and the Portuguese colonial regime, carried their intensive, often-ethnohistorical regional studies chronologically forward into the later colonial era and the national period. The new, expanded title of this excellent English translation is a bit misleading but probably appropriate since it will attract student readers to a subject on which there are few books of similar quality available in English. The foreword, although slightly excessive in its emphasis on the originality of researching the subject of Indian slavery and the ethnohistorical approach, does capture the importance and novelty of Monteiro's focus on indigenous peoples as the protagonists of early Brazilian history.The subtitle of the original Portuguese-language monograph, “Indians and bandeirantes in the origins of São Paulo,” provides a clearer idea of what Monteiro believed was the central contribution of his book. Monteiro's principal objective was to overturn a historiography that emphasized the marginality of early São Paulo and the bravery of its intrepid backwoodsmen in order to demonstrate the continued importance of indigenous labor to the origins of the Portuguese settlement of southern Brazil and especially to that region's economic importance as a producer of wheat and other subsistence crops.Monteiro starts with two chapters on early contact in São Paulo during the sixteenth century and the bandeirante expeditions in the next century, respectively. He draws on the extensive sources and historiography produced by or about the Jesuits as well as on governmental correspondence, but with far more attention to and detail about the region's various indigenous peoples and their strategies of alliance or resistance in the face of both missionary and colonist pressures. Arrangements of alliance and exchange changed as warfare and disease decimated native peoples and the balance of power shifted in favor of the Portuguese colonists, who turned increasingly to enslavement of Indians drawn from an ever-widening territorial radius. By the seventeenth century, the chronic demand for Indian labor had drawn the Paulistas and their mestiço sons and Indian allies far into the interior; their expeditions brought back thousands of men, women, and children of a variety of peoples as slaves (thus the label “blacks of the land” to distinguish them from Africans, or “blacks of Guiné”).The majority of these enslaved peoples were not exported to the northeastern sugar estates but employed on the farms around São Paulo. This was a revision that had already been suggested in the historiography before Monteiro's book but that his research documented in detail, which he then elaborated to demonstrate how São Paulo became the “granary of Brazil” and how its society was shaped by the presence of captive labor, even long after Indian slavery had been abolished. In three exceptional chapters drawing on municipal records, notary books, wills, and testaments and always with an eye to the ethnic and linguistic differences of the indigenous peoples enslaved, Monteiro provides a social history informed by ethnography and by a command of the existing historiography. He documents how, despite the prohibition against Indian enslavement, local custom allowed the colonists to treat their supposed wards as property, and he illustrates how this regime of “personal service” of Indians allowed great fortunes to be made. But these arrangements also generated considerable inequality in the Paulista countryside, and as acquiring new indigenous workers became more difficult and costly, the region's agriculture declined and large segments of the population lived in poverty.Throughout the captaincy but especially in the rural towns and villages, Indians remained a presence, and Monteiro shows not only how native peoples were integrated into colonial society through godparentage arrangements, but also how their presence made rural São Paulo a bilingual area where Tupi was widely spoken. By the early eighteenth century, long after the Brazilian northeast had turned to black slavery and even after gold had been found in Minas Gerais, rural São Paulo was still poor, its indigenous laborers had dwindled and declined, and the generations of mixed-race bastardos that had succeeded them had now become the people of the area. As Monteiro observes in closing his outstanding book, “an impoverished peasantry was what remained after the rapid destruction of so much land and so many Indians” (p. 217). This important book that has influenced a generation of Brazilian historians will now hopefully do the same as an excellent introduction to colonial Brazil for English-language readers

Archaeology · Colonialism · Historiography · Indigenous · Library science · Originality · Portuguese · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subtitle · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · History of Colonial Brazil · Philosophy

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