Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels

Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Teresa Cribelli

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781107100565
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316723098
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

An account of modernization and technological innovation in nineteenth-century Brazil that provides a distinctly Brazilian perspective. Existing scholarship on the period describes the beginnings of Brazilian modernization as a European or North American import dependent on foreign capital, transfers of technology, and philosophical inspiration. Promoters of modernization were considered few in number, derivative in their thinking, or thwarted by an entrenched slaveholding elite hostile to industrialization. Teresa Cribelli presents a more nuanced picture. Nineteenth-century Brazilians selected among the transnational flow of ideas and technologies with care and attention to the specific conditions of their tropical nation. Studying underutilized sources, Cribelli illuminates a distinctly Brazilian vision of modernization that challenges the view that Brazil, a nation dependent on slave labor for much of the nineteenth century, was merely reactive in the face of the modernization models of the North Atlantic industrializing nations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Map
• Notes on Orthography
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Nineteenth-Century Modernization in Brazil
• 2 The Vocabulary of Brazilian Modernization
• 3 Industrial Forests
• 4 The Most Useful of Instruments: Plows and Agricultural Innovation
• 5 Road-Building and Railroads: Challenges to Modernization
• 6 Trolleys, Railroads, and Factories, or Civilization and Barbarism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index