Laws of Chance

“Focusing on a fascinating place and time, Amy Chazkel casts unprecedented light on the tangled relations among gambling, market culture, and the modern state. She also tells a lot of good stories. Laws of Chance is a delight to read, as well as a major work of imaginative historical scholarship.”—Jackson Lears, author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America
“Taking the origins and evolution of a seemingly innocuous and commonplace informal lottery—the Brazilian ‘animal game’—as a foundation, this study builds concentric rings of information and analysis to explore relationships between law and practice, state and society, formal institutions and everyday life. The result is an illuminating essay on modernity and urban culture more broadly.”—Thomas Holloway, University of California, Davis
“Carefully crafted and theoretically informed, Chazkel’s thought-provoking book joins recent works by Brodwyn Fischer and Janice Perlman to deepen our understanding of lower-class life in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and the important, if often misinterpreted, relationship between state and society. . . . Her account of the complex interaction between state and society moves us far beyond superficial understandings based on models of repression and resistance and deepens our understanding of Latin America’s urban modernity.” -- Hendrik Kraay * The Americas *
“This intriguing study carefully considers the game from its modest beginnings up through its florescence as a virtual “culture industry” in Brazil.” -- Andrew Grant Wood * American Historical Review *
“Laws of Chance is well written, and a joy to read. Methodologically, Chazkel offers a deft interweaving of social and jurisprudential theory with a detailed examination of historical experience….  Laws of Chance exposes a fascinating and hitherto unexplored segment of turn-of-the-twentiethcentury business and city life in Rio de Janeiro to the light of day. The book also offers an excellent example of the ways in which business and cultural history intersect and can reinforce each other.” -- Gail Triner, * Business History Review *
“Laws of Chance is that rare monograph that truly delivers on the promise of its subtitle...Chazkel's study rises to the forefront of the new wave of social history that has succeeded in pushing well beyond the tired binaries of repression/resistance and agency/subjugation.”  -- Zephyr Frank * Journal of Social History *
“Laws of Chance is well-written and free of jargon, effectively weaving description and analysis with great historical imagination and theoretical relevance. The book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on urban studies, modern Latin American state-society relations, postabolition citizenship, and the development of informal economies. Its importance to all these fields reflects how the book, by historicizing the jogo do bicho and the ambiguous, informal world it inhabited, advances important disciplinary and interdisciplinary arguments about extralegality, citizenship, and urban development.” -- Patricia Acerbi * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"Chazkel’s book is insightful and well crafted, providing an in-depth look at one of the practices most commonly associated with the origins of Brazil’s current corruption."  -- Manuel Balan * Latin American Research Review *