American Mirror - (America in the World) by Roberto Saba (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and Brazil

In 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 the global market, and governing elites feared the system's demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital.

Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians--which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others--consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade.

Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.

Review Quotes

"[American Mirror] is a signal contribution to an important literature . . . [and] written by an erudite and graceful writer. . . . The book has the ultimate merit of inducing readers to think more deeply about these settler colonial regimes that were constructed in recent centuries at enormous costs in this hemisphere."---Gerald Horne, Diplomatic History

"Challenging traditional scholarship, Saba elucidates the US's role in fostering the rise of capitalism throughout the hemisphere in the decades prior to the embrace of imperialism in the late 19th century."-- "Choice"

"Honorable Mention for the Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award"

"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

"Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association"

"Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations"

"Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations"

About the Author

Roberto Saba is assistant professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University.