With an introduction and a collection of fifteen chapters, Fischer and Grinberg have provided one of the most insightful and wide-ranging analyses of slavery, abolition, and its legacies in Brazil published to date. The editors’ introduction highlights three individuals who re-surface throughout the volume. Son of a wealthy landowner in the province (now state) of Pernambuco, Joaquim Nabuco (1813–1878) founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society in September 1880. That Society and Nabuco’s book Abolitionism (1883) helped to foment a movement that brought Brazilian slavery to an end in 1888. Nabuco denounced slavery’s impact on all sectors of Brazilian society, highlighting how it corrupted the rule of law and harmed economic development.
From the same state of Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) became one of Brazil’s most famous intellectuals of the twentieth century. Freyre’s depiction of beneficent slave owners and “racial democracy” in post-emancipation Brazil have been thoroughly debunked. Nevertheless, his descriptions of...