RICHARD GRAHAM is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil; Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil; Independence in Latin America: A Comparative Approach; and several edited books, including The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 and Machado de Assis: Reflections on the Brazilian Master Writer

This is an exemplary work of social history that would benefit scholars interested in both slave societies and urban provisioning. (Jeffrey M. Pilcher, University of Minnesota Journal of Social History 2013-03-