Brazil

Herbert Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna have formed a prolific partnership over the past two decades producing a half dozen or so coauthored books. This social and economic survey of Brazilian history draws on some of their other works, most notably The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (2014) and Modern Brazil: A Social History (2020), both also published by Cambridge University Press. It forges much further back into the past than these two previous works, covering not only colonial and imperial Brazil but all the way back to the first peopling of the Americas. As with their other work, this is a data-heavy volume with dozens of graphs and tables throughout with a strong emphasis on demography. This should hardly be surprising for two scholars who have been practitioners of quantitative, social science history since the 1960s (Klein) and 1970s (Luna).After an introductory chapter on the climate and soils of Brazil, the second chapter provides a masterful, state-of-the-art discussion of the literature and debates on the peopling of the Americas. Not very many histories of Brazil begin 16,000 to 20,000 years ago! The third chapter covers the colonial period, and the remaining four chapters are divided between two on the nineteenth and two on the twentieth century (with the last moving into the twenty-first). As typical of their other works, each of these chapters delves into major themes (such as demography, social classes, labor, agriculture, industrialization, race, and inequality) through the presentation of quantitative (and, sometimes, qualitative) data. This is not a work for those interested in political and cultural history. For those not as interested in the details of the data, the chapters begin and end with beautifully succinct summaries.The chapter on the waves of northeast Asian migrants eventually moving into South America brings Klein and Luna up to the sixteenth century and the arrival of the Portuguese. A section on the migratory patterns of the Portuguese then moves on to a detailed discussion of the waves of Africans moving into the various regions of Brazil. (Both Klein and Luna, of course, have published extensively on slavery and the slave trade.) These waves of peoples take the analysis up to 1700, and the chapter on colonial Brazil then moves through familiar themes—sugar, gold, coffee—and the social groups that emerged in the colonial era. There is detailed attention here to the demography of slavery. The first chapter on the nineteenth century focuses on economic patterns, continuing the analysis of coffee and slavery with an emphasis on infrastructure and transportation. Klein and Luna emphasize the cycles of coffee, rubber, and cacao, as well as the growing regional variations in the formation of domestic markets in the export economy. The following chapter delves into the data on social groups, demography, and immigration patterns.Industrialization and urbanization frame the first chapter on the twentieth century. “The 100 years,” Klein and Luna state, “between the 1880s and the 1980s would be the period of the greatest changes in the Brazilian economy and society” (p. 192). During this century, Brazil experienced massive industrialization and urbanization, but with one of the worst concentrations of incomes in the world by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this period, Brazil finally achieved universal primary education, major improvements in public health, and a demographic profile similar to North Atlantic nations. The debt crisis of the 1980s marks the end of this century of growth and serves as the transition into the final chapter, on liberalization and globalization. Politics, with more specificity about people and policies, plays a role in this chapter that effectively covers just three decades. The various economic plans and administrations receive close attention here. Klein and Luna note that “for all its limitations as a welfare state in a developing economy, Brazil nevertheless succeeded in reducing many of the regional and income disparities and effectively reducing both indigence and poverty in the nation” (p. 278). After a detailed analysis of data on social indicators and religion they finish on a note of uncertainty: “If the past is history, the future is problematic without a coherent government plan to promote economic growth” (p. 298).Herbert Klein has lamented the unwillingness of historians of Latin America in the United States to engage with social scientists and quantitative history (see his lecture published in the July 2016 issue of The Americas). This is a rich text that both complements and challenges other histories of Brazil that focus primarily on culture, politics, and qualitative social history. We would do well to read and engage with all these styles of history

Geography · Political science · Economic Theory and Policy · History