Synopses & Reviews
Throughout the nineteenth century the idyllic island of Fernando de Noronha, which lies two hundred miles off Braziland#39;s northeastern coast, was home to Braziland#39;s largest forced labor penal colony. In Punishment in Paradise Peter M. Beattie uses Noronha as a case study to understand nineteenth-century Braziland#39;s varied social and cultural values, especially in relation to justice, class, color, civil condition, human rights and labor. As Brazilandrsquo;s slave population declined after 1850, the use of colonial-era disciplinary practices at Noronhaandmdash;such as flogging and forced laborandmdash;stoked anxieties about human rights and Brazilandrsquo;s international image. Beattie contends that the treatment of slaves, convicts, and other social categories subject to coercive labor extraction were interconnected and that reforms that benefitted one of these categories made them harder to deny to others. In detailing Noronhaand#39;s history and the end of slavery as part of an international expansion of human rights, Beattie places Brazil firmly in the purview of Atlantic history.
Review
andquot;Using the Fernando de Noronha penal colony as a metaphor for Brazilian society, Peter M. Beattie has written a superb microhistory that is in fact a macrohistory. By examining debates over psychology, sexuality, and criminality, Punishment in Paradise analyzes state attempts to control Braziland#39;s social and geographic margins. Beattieand#39;s creative questions and methods provide new answers to an old question: why was Brazil the last country in the Americas to end slavery and one of the very first to end capital punishment.andquot;
Review
andquot;Peter Beattieandrsquo;s superb study opens an entirely new window on the most under-researched segment of postcolonial Brazilian society. The great majority of the Braziland#39;s population by the second half of the nineteenth century consisted of free people of little means, but their precarious lives have repeatedly frustrated even the most painstaking archival investigations.and#160;By mining the documentary treasures of the records from Fernando de Noronha, Beattie probes the way elites and the poor, in a society transitioning away from slavery, negotiated and reconfigured hierarchies of race, status, and reputation. Every student of Brazil and the South Atlantic is deeply in his debt.andquot;
Synopsis
Peter M. Beattie provides a detailed examination of the nineteenth-century Brazilian island penal colony Fernando de Noronha, in which he shows how it serves as a metaphor for Brazilian society and was key to Braziland#39;s abolishment of slavery.
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About the Author
Peter M. Beattie is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.and#160; He is the author of The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil 1864-1945, also published by Duke University Press, and he has served as coeditor of the Luso Brazilian Review for the areas of history and social science since 2004.