American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

"Challenging traditional scholarship, Saba elucidates the US's role in fostering the rise of capitalism throughout the hemisphere in the decades prior to the embrace of imperialism in the late 19th century."—Choice

"The transition to free and wage labor in Brazil was a complex process with multiple causality, and Saba’s book presents a provocative new understanding of this process. He has made a worthy contribution to the understanding of transnational relations between Brazil and the United States in the age of emancipation."—Mariana Muaze, The Journal of the Civil War Era

"This provocative book brings out fresh views of the historical relationship between the United States and Brazil, and in particular, these nations' entangled histories of slavery, emancipation, and capitalism. Notably, American Mirror raises the bar on the depth and familiarity that scholars of U.S. history should have with other parts of the world."—Celso Thomas Castilho, Vanderbilt University

"In this vibrant book, Roberto Saba’s pathbreaking research brings to light the now largely forgotten economic and ideological connections between Brazil and the United States in the nineteenth century. Saba situates U.S. history in a hemispheric context, highlighting the ideological interconnectedness of slavery and technological development across the Americas."—Teresa Cribelli, University of Alabama

"With stylish prose and great persuasive force, American Mirror analyzes the international political economy that drew together Brazilian slaveholders and Northern U.S. antislavery businessmen in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a remarkable and remarkably accessible work, one that historians of the Americas will need to reckon with and that transnational historians should learn from."—Gregory P. Downs, University of California, Davis

"Ambitious and beautifully executed, American Mirror shows that gradual emancipation in Brazil grew as a project involving Brazilian coffee planters, antislavery activists, and American capital. It does something no other work has attempted: it traces the triumph of free labor in the two largest slaveholding nations in the Western hemisphere. This rigorously researched and pathbreaking book is filled with uncommonly rich insights."—Thavolia Glymph, Duke University