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A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Reconcavo, 1780-1860. By B. I Barickman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. ix + 276 pp. Maps, index, charts, tables, bibliography, notes. Cloth, $55. ISBN 0-804-72632-9.
B.J. Barickman borrows the title of his important monograph on slavebased agricultural production in northeastern Brazil from Fernando Ortiz's classic Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar, originally pubfished in 1940. Like Ortiz, Barickman explores the contrast, or "counterpoint," between these two cash crops in order to shed light on export agriculture and the slave system that made large-scale production possible. Barickman extends his comparative exercise still further by also examining the cultivation of foodstuffs for local consumption. He thereby makes a major contribution to an emerging body of scholarship that contests what has come to be known as the "plantationist perspective." According to that perspective, Brazil's colonial economy and society remained, throughout the nineteenth century, fatally bound to, and dependent upon, the large estate, monocultural production, and the overseas market. Barickman focuses on the fertile northeastern region of Bahia, Brazil's leading center of both sugar and tobacco production during the early decades of the century, and finds good reason to reject the plantationist view as far too narrow. Instead, he contends that expansion in the Bahian export trade required not only the plantation but also other forms of farming enterprises and depended not only on thriving demand abroad but also on a vigorous regional foodstuffs market as well. "In contrapuntal fashion," he argues, "interlocking relationships . . . linked the daily lives of planters, urban consumers, rural slaves, and small farmers to both local and overseas markets,...