Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony - Softcover

"Peter Beattie has crafted a thoughtfully researched sociolegal history. Punishment in Paradise will be essential reading for scholars and students of crime, punishment, and justice in addition to labor regimes within the transatlantic nineteenth century. It should also attract a broad readership, including those interested in Brazilian history as well as slavery and abolition." -- Manuella Meyer * Hispanic American Historical Review * "Beattie illuminate[s] themes that have been largely overlooked or neglected in national historiographies." -- Evan C. Rothera * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies * "Punishment in Paradise provides much food for thought and invitation to debate. Like The Tribute of Blood, it should shape syllabi and research agendas for years to come." -- Marc A. Hertzman * Luso-Brazilian Review * "Punishment in Paradise will be essential reading for scholars and legal practitioners interested in understanding the criminal law and penal practice and its embeddedness in a long history of labor appropriation. It should attract a broad readership, including those interested in Brazilian history, the transatlantic nineteenth century, slavery and abolition, and the history of crime and punishment. This book should make its way onto syllabi for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of crime and justice; the history of gender and sexuality; and the social history of Brazil, Latin America, and the Atlantic world generally." -- Amy Chazkel * H-Law, H-Net Reviews * "Punishment in Paradise unearths new and unique archival material, engages with a wide breadth of scholarship, and is deftly written. It will be essential reading for scholars of Brazil, slavery, and coerced labor in the Atlantic World as well as scholars interested in the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, criminality, and human rights." -- Lena Suk * Labor * "Peter Beattie has produced a multi-faceted and insightful study, a prime example of how to study Brazil's popular classes as both a coherent and a multi-faceted group.... [A] balanced and well-written book, one crowned by a handful of brilliant concepts that will raise the bar for future studies of popular groups in Brazil's long nineteenth century." -- Oscar de la Torre * Canadian Journal of History * "The originality of this volume lies in this broad approach and its capacity to cut across the boundaries of various sub-disciplines.... The volume is well written and has a clear structure, the documentary basis rich and varied and its interpretations convincing." -- Christian G. de Vito * Journal of Latin American Studies * "This work is a valuable tool for graduate teaching in Brazilian, Latin American, or African diaspora history, and it is essential reading for scholars of the Atlantic world." -- Zachary R. Morgan * American Historical Review * "As a way to reflect on Brazil as a whole at the time, as well as on penology, gender, slavery, and human rights in the greater Atlantic world, Fernando de Noronha's history magnifies some points and either distorts or omits others. But Beattie's approach shows how this unique setting can inform a varied range of larger issues." -- Thomas H. Holloway * Journal of Interdisciplinary History * "Beattie's account of the events on Fernando and its various classes of inmates and other inhabitants is extremely rich in detail and a good read from beginning to end." -- Pieter Spierenburg * British Journal of Criminology *

Throughout the nineteenth century the idyllic island of Fernando de Noronha, which lies two hundred miles off Brazil's northeastern coast, was home to Brazil's largest forced labor penal colony. In Punishment in Paradise Peter M. Beattie uses Noronha as a case study to understand nineteenth-century Brazil's varied social and cultural values, especially in relation to justice, class, color, civil condition, human rights and labor. As Brazil's slave population declined after 1850, the use of colonial-era disciplinary practices at Noronha-such as flogging and forced labor-stoked anxieties about human rights and Brazil'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 Noronha'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.