University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 American Mirror: The United States And The Empire Of Brazil In The Age Of Emancipation Roberto Saba University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Saba, Roberto, "American Mirror: The United States And The Empire Of Brazil In The Age Of Emancipation" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2561. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2561 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2561 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. American Mirror: The United States And The Empire Of Brazil In The Age Of Emancipation Abstract This dissertation traces the triumph of free labor in the two largest slave societies of the nineteenth- century western world: the United States and Brazil. Drawing on a range of primary sources from American and Brazilian archives, it reconstructs the intense circulation of transnational agents between these two countries from the 1840s to the 1880s. It shows how these exchanges transformed the political economies of both nations: whereas Brazil attracted American capital and expertise to modernize its economic structure and accomplish a smooth transition from slave to free labor; the United States seized the opportunity to invest, develop, and encourage free labor in Brazil, which had long been under the influence of the British Empire. As vital as chattel slavery had become to the nineteenth-century world economy, a coalition of American and Brazilian reformers proposed that an even more efficient and profitable labor system could eplacer it.