Peter M. Beattie is Associate Professor of History and the Acting Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University. He is the author of The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil 1864-1945 (Duke, 2001) and editor of The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil (SR Books, 2004). His research interests lie at the intersection of Brazil’s state institutions and its multiracial and multiethnic poor (including enslaved populations) from around 1850 to 1950 through a combination of social, cultural, and institutional history. He is currently working on a monograph about the civil criminal justice system in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco from 1850 to 1900 to examine how state institutions responded to the decline and ultimate abolition of slavery in 1888. The study seeks a different perspective on the system by starting inside prisons and then moving outward to understand the workings of courts, juries, police, militia, and armed forces. He is also pursuing micro-history projects based on nineteenth century court cases from the regional appellate court in Recife, Pernambuco. One day when he grows up, he fantasizes about a giant grant and a team of researchers who will pursue a comparative history of military impressment and conscription systems in nations and empires across the world from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. It will be a tribute to and a reworking of Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits approached from a different side, where many outlaws found or were bound to “legitimate” employment.