Content area
Full text
British Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Business, Culture and Identity in Bahia, 1808-1850. By Louise H. Guenther. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2004. xi + 211 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Paper, £20.00. ISBN: 0-954-40703-2.
This brief, interesting, and accessible study offers a microcosmic counterpoint to macroeconomic studies of British informal empire in Latin America. Taking as her focus the minuscule British merchant colony that formed in Bahia after the opening of Brazil's ports in 1808, Louise Guenther offers an "anthropological examination" of the early expatriates and the self-consciously isolated community they created. Guenther argues throughout that the legendary British refusal to "go native" helped establish an outward image of cohesion that belied the settlers' preoccupation with minute gradations of social status. To the Brazilians of Bahia, at least, the British became a distinct and unified community.
Early chapters set up the rather awkward position of British merchants in Brazil after 1808. The first British wholesalers arrived in Bahia to profit from their mother country's commanding position in world trade and diplomacy. A favorable commercial treaty, signed shortly after emperor Dom João VI arrived at Rio de Janeiro following his escape from Napoleon's army in Portugal, allowed British manufactures to enter Brazil at a rate even lower than Portuguese goods. The treaty also included a special court system that amounted to extraterritoriality for British citizens. These privileges helped British merchants gain control of 60 percent or more of Bahia's import and export trade by 1855 (p. 13).
Naturally, British commercial preeminence aroused jealousy among Brazilians...