Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa (review)
Evan Lieberman's study is a longitudinal comparison of the interplay of fiscal and social structures roughly between 1880 and today, a historically sensitive study of nation building and state-building through the lens of taxation policy. What make this study especially innovative are the countries he analyzes. Brazil and South Africa are rarely compared, even though they would seem to demand comparison. The first is American, colonized by the Portuguese with heavy Italian immigration; the second is African and colonized by the English and the Dutch Afrikaner. Brazil , was one of the first American countries to win independence (1822) and to establish a solid central state under a constitutional monarch; South Africa was not a unified country until almost a hundred years later, and separated from the British Commonwealth in 1961. The national myths and conventional wisdom of the two countries are almost diametrically opposed: Brazil is known as the country of racial democracy (slavery was abolished in 1888), while South Africa is the land of racial apartheid, a system institutionalized in 1948.