Volkswagen in the Amazon
The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil

The first history of the German multinational's resounding failure in its global development project of a cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon.

Antoine Acker (Author)

9781107197428, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 September 2017

326 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.58 kg

'In articulating new conceptual lines that make the work so rich and original, Volkswagen in the Amazon fits well into a new wave of recent studies (including my own) that demonstrate how the very notion of development, far from being a clear and constant signifier, is rather a polysemic conduit for different and competing meanings among different social actors situated in concrete historical junctures.' Rafael R. Ioris, The American Historical Review

From 1973 to 1987, Volkswagen's (VW) 140,000 hectare 'pioneer' cattle ranch on the Amazon frontier laid bare the limits of capitalist development. These limits were not only economic, with the core management of a multinational company engaged in the 'integration' of an extreme world periphery, but they were also legal and ethical, with the involvement of indentured labor and massive forest burning. Its physical limits were exposed by an unpredictable ecosystem refusing to submit to VW's technological arsenal. Antoine Acker reveals how the VW ranch, a major project supported by the Brazilian military dictatorship, was planned, negotiated, and eventually undone by the intervention of internationally connected actors and events.

1. Setting the stage: the Amazon as a horizon
2. The making of a model ranch (1973–1976)
3. Development in the age of scarcity (1976–1983)
4. Out-of-date modernity: forced labor at Cristalino (1983–1986)
5. Cristalino's unhappy ending.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], History: specific events & topics [HBT], History of the Americas [HBJK], General & world history [HBG]