Amy Chazkel Laws of Chance Hardcover Book sku-15547432

Amy Chazkel's Laws of Chance, sku-15547432, is a hardcover in Latin American History Books. It traces the jogo do bicho, or “animal game,” from a Rio de Janeiro zoo raffle in 1892 to a lottery that spread across Brazil and remains popular there. Chazkel describes how booking agents, dealers and players spread through Rio as the outlawed game moved underground.

She examines its popularity, its survival through state repression and its meanings for urban public life after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the founding of the Brazilian republic in 1889. She argues that this unlicensed trade anticipated later informal economies in Latin American cities. Police records show that players and ticket sellers were often arrested but rarely prosecuted.

The book also argues that ticket sellers, corrupt police and lenient judges worked out forms of everyday justice through their dealings with the official judicial system, shaping Brazilian public life through the twentieth century.