Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels

Abstract

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.

The Ruins of a Steel Mill: Planetary Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon

“…27 The ideal culmination of this attempted modernization, in Amazonia like in Brazil as a whole, was urban industrialization as an economic, material, social, political, and even civilizing compact. 28 Getúlio Vargas's iconic "Speech of the Amazon River," delivered in Manaus in 1940, illustrates the spirit of this agenda. In this speech he argued that Brazil would "conquer and dominate the valleys of the great Equatorial torrents, transforming their extraordinary fertility into disciplined energy."…”