Zephyr L. Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Albuquerque (University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

In Dutra’s World, Zephyr L. Frank traces the economic shifts and continuities of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. Frank anchors his analysis in the life and death of Antonio José Dutra, a former-slave then barber who captures many of the common characteristics of middling wealthholders of the emerging southeastern city of Brazil—including the ownership of enslaved people. Based on a large dataset of postmortem estate inventories, he argues that the entanglement of institutions, economic growth, and demographic changes led to a definitive, yet slow transformation of the structures that shaped Dutra’s life and the contrasting fate of his offspring after his death. The gradual decline and later abolition of slavery, immigration, and the transformations in banking and investments yielded a very different world for the latter, where the constraints to upward social mobility hardened.

                  Students of the history of Brazil usually consider it an anomaly among Latin American countries. Its relatively bloodless independence from Portugal in 1822, for instance, left most of the economic structures and wealth accumulation processes intact. Brazil was also the largest recipient of enslaved people of the Americas, boasting over 4 million people transported during the trade. By the 1820s, around the time Dutra probably arrived in Brazil, roughly half of the population lived unfree. The institution of slavery lies at the core of Dutra’s World.

In the context of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, however, the politics and economics of slavery overflow many of the traditional narratives around its North American version. As Frank’s book shows, the ownership of enslaved people was not an exclusive trait of Brazilian elites but a widespread practice among middling wealthholders too. Slavery played a fundamental role in opening pathways for wealth accumulation and social mobility in the city and, since the financial possibilities of this group were limited, they became more dependent on it as investments, assets, and wealth. A critical claim in the book detaches from this conclusion: antislavery movements took a long time to take root in Brazil because the economic structure made their goal unattractive for middling wealthholders. When the value of slavery diminished, it became politically viable to abolish it.

Dutra’s journey thus serves as a window to explore some of these claims. He escaped slavery and became a slaveholder years later, navigating Rio’s social structure towards a better economic situation. By the time of his death, he owned thirteen slaves, two houses, musical instruments, clothes. But he died at a tipping point of Brazilian history and things changed: from a world with inexpensive enslaved people, slow but steady economic growth, and rapid urbanization to a world of railroads, banks, and stocks, an export-driven economy, and higher prices of people in bondage. Frank shows how and why Dutra’s world collapsed after his death—and situates the difficulties that emerged from the rubble.

Throughout the book, Frank feels comfortable reproducing the dehumanizing discourse that legitimized slavery for centuries, reducing enslaved people to merely a commodity. He refers to them as “assets” or “investments,” they “depreciate” and reflect inflation, yet at the same time, they were not “real property” (p. 60). The language reflects Frank’s “objective,” “quantifiable” and “falsifiable” approach to the history of Brazil. Although he attempts to provide some life to this portrait by introducing the case study of Dutra, the book remains a distanced, structural analysis of Rio de Janeiro’s economy based on a sample of estate inventories. The concept of culture, for example—which some may argue captures an extensive repertoire of values, beliefs, practices, and experiences that make up human lives and their worlds—appears only as an explanation for “irrational,” non-maximizing behavior (p. 36).

Despite the considerable amount of work behind Dutra’s World, it fails to build a cogent historical narrative of what such a world entailed. Invoking a quantitative, systematic approach repeatedly does not automatically yield a compelling argument. Even when authors go beyond what Frank offers in his book—a dense, detailed description of the available quantitative data, its distribution and significance—and perform serious statistical analyses, the validity of their claims depends on the narrative arrangement of the evidence (“to uncover the mechanisms at work,” as some of them would put it). A closer look at the appendix reveals many potential flaws in his data, methods, and conclusions. Just to name one: randomizing the sampling process, as he did by choosing one of every three or “every other” of the available estate inventories, does not translate into a representative sample. A more traditional reflection on the politics of the archive, who made it, and why, what does its content entail, would offer a different picture and a deeper understanding of the data.

In short, Frank relies on the type of data he uses to ensure the importance and plausibility of the argument, when they lie in the way the writer interweaves them in a historical framework (this idea even allows him to write extensively paragraphs he correctly referred to as mere speculations). The result remains a partial, incomplete portrait of one of Dutra’s worlds: what he owned, the economy and social structures he navigated to get it, what his children fought for, and a little of how he made a living. It seems that many aspects of Dutra’s life will remain in the dark after all— “There are other worlds,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but they are in this one.”