Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels

Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels is a marvelous book about Brazil's coming to terms with its modernization while holding fast to its unmodern self. The book asks how modernization was understood by those who promoted it and those whose lives were upended by it. Modernization unfolded against the backdrop of two major features of nineteenth-century Brazil at odds with one another: the persistent institution of slavery and the hierarchical, racist social order that it had created, and the desire to modernize both economy and society à la the North Atlantic experience. How to reconcile the two? Brazilian modernizers believed that technology had the capacity to improve economic productivity and to elevate the knowledge, character, and quality of the Brazilian working class without challenging the established social order. This book reveals an agenda of cautious modernization at the macro level that was shaped by local practicalities at the micro level. The book offers a fresh, original take on Brazil's nineteenth-century history as an exercise in Comtian positivism brought to life.The desires of the reformers and the reactions to their agenda are mined from government reports, catalogs of international exhibitions promoting Brazilian progress, articles in a scientific and technological journal, patent applications, illustrated weeklies, and paid letters published in Rio de Janeiro's newspapers. Teresa Cribelli asks how Brazilians understood modernity, whether they considered the possibilities of locally sourced products as engines of development, why they turned their backs on proven technologies imported from abroad to adhere to old productive techniques, and whether the modern technologies that they did adopt fostered domestic know-how. Contrary to Roberto Schwarz's classic critique of nineteenth-century Brazil, according to which an antiquated structure of colonialism and slavery persisted in an advanced superstructure of European liberalism, Cribelli argues that Brazil's modernizers did not blindly or reflexively imitate imported European notions about modernity. Rather, they responded to local contexts that shaped whether ideas and technologies were adopted, adapted, or discarded. Brazilians were responding to Enlightenment thought and an industrialized world, no doubt, but they created their own modernization that reflected local circumstances. To take one example, chapter 4 asks why Brazilians rejected reformers' calls for agricultural education and laborsaving machinery, especially the heavy plow and the tractor, workhorses of North Atlantic agricultural productivity. Why persist in the destructive practice of slash-and-burn agriculture? The answer was practical, not ideological, rational, not backward. Swidden agriculture was cheaper and better suited to local conditions, while plows and tractors were difficult to maintain and repair. A study of patent activity revealed that planters were innovative when it made economic sense, such as substituting coffee-processing machines for labor when slave populations were in decline.Underscoring every chapter are the anxiety-producing social effects of modernization that brought old ways into conflict with new. On the one hand, modernizers viewed technology as a catalyst for social improvement. Factory schools sought to educate poor Brazilians in the manual arts, acculturate them to the rhythms of factory life, and civilize them through wage labor. Railroads represented the modern face and standardized tempo of a nation in transformation. International congresses dedicated to industrial and agricultural progress spurred Brazilians to identify, name, and catalog their abundant flora and to recast the forest as a scientific and industrial resource. On the other hand, modernization was perceived as a threat to social status and hierarchy. Laborsaving agricultural mechanization challenged planter status and authority, measured in numbers of dependents and slaves, while urban technologies threatened to replace servants with machines. Wage laborers worked in the modern economy yet were denigrated by the association of manual work with slavery. Artificial rhythms of modern transportation collapsed physical distances in a disorienting fashion, while cramped spaces of urban trolleys violated the decorum of interactions between genders and classes.Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels, which recently received honorable mention for the Brazil Section book prize of the Latin American Studies Association, is as accessible and engaging as it is smart. Cribelli lets the sources shape the book, taking her cues about anxieties surrounding modernization from letters published in the Rio press. An authentically Brazilian modernization emerges, attuned to local context and contingency. I am usually skeptical of books that use Rio de Janeiro to stand in for Brazil, but Cribelli is careful not to overstate the perspectives that she captures. The government reports, pamphlets, exhibition catalogs, cartoons, and citizens' letters were the work of literate, white males. Yet this caveat does not diminish the strength of the book's analysis or conclusions. Cribelli convinced me that these voices of modernization, both the promoters and the worriers, were worth listening to in order to understand in the skin what it was like as Brazilians were being modernized along with the economy around them

Economic growth · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Institution · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Productivity · Social science · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History of Colonial Brazil · Law