Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels
Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

A nuanced understanding of modernization in nineteenth-century Brazil that demonstrates Brazilian commitment to technological innovation.

Teresa Cribelli (Author)

9781107496651, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 November 2018

271 pages, 26 b/w illus. 1 map
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'Teresa Cribelli's fine monograph Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil examines how elites in imperial Brazil thought about modernization, how it applied to their own society, and how they attempted to adapt European ideas and technologies to Brazil.' Marshall C. Eakin, The American Historical Review

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of engineering & technology [TBX], Impact of science & technology on society [PDR], Industrialisation & industrial history [HBTK], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]