Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880–1905 (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, 2009), pp. vii+187, £20.00, pb.
recent works in comparative frontier history. Indeed, Langer has long contributed to ‘ the new mission history ’ that examines native and European cultures and institutions coming into contact and transforming each other. In this book, Langer analyses how a particular combination of physical, cultural and institutional environments shaped and ultimately doomed the missionary enterprise. Confronting a resilient indigenous population never bowed by the Incas or Spaniards, and in the absence of a coercive state apparatus, the Franciscans were thrown into the bush on their own and forced to improvise, adapt and accommodate local conditions as they tried to carve proto-industrial Christian utopias out of the jungle. In the area of historical legacies, Langer’s conclusions are ambiguous – perhaps because the missionaries themselves were only partially successful in achieving their goals (and in any case, the friars were profoundly ambivalent about the republican ideal of converting ‘ savages ’ into citizens). Rhetorically wedded to the moral uplift and political integration of their Indian charges, the missionaries ‘ failed to inculcate the idea of Bolivian citizenship ’ and aimed solely at remaking Indians into a subaltern labouring class on the frontier. In this sense it might be argued that the missionaries actually served the interests of Bolivia’s political elite, which had little interest in bringing Indians into the nation-state as political subjects and citizens until well into the twentieth century.