The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States


Book Description

This edited volume provides comparative and transnational histories of the working people of Brazil and the United States. The international group of historians’ methodologically innovative chapters explore links, resonances, and divergences between US and Brazilian labor history.







The Interior


Book Description

A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions. In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazil’s history.




A Third Path


Book Description

"A transnational history of corporatism-a "third path" between capitalism and communism-centered on mid-twentieth century Brazil. Following the First World War, there was a widespread feeling that the unchecked free-market competition had given rise to financial crisis, social unrest, and chronic underdevelopment. With people and governments across the world looking for an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, Brazil took a central role in experimenting with a "third path" between capitalism and communism: corporatism. Remaking Capitalism: A Global History of Corporatism in Brazil, 1920s-1960s argues that corporatism transformed the Brazilian state into an agent of economic development, and it explains why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime. Melissa Teixeira incorporates wide-ranging legal, economic, and cultural sources to document the process of state-building from the perspective of government ministries and grocery markets alike from 1917 to the 1950s. During the Getulio Vargas regime (1930-45), especially, the state took an unprecedented role in controlling social pressures and economic growth via wage and price agencies, labor tribunals and technical councils. Teixeira looks beyond categorical authoritarianism to explain how corporatism constituted an early experiment with the mixed economy as a path to development, combining state planning with a market economy. Corporatism, she shows, generated a model of development dependent on uneven and unequal citizenship, in which economic interests-and not individuals-organized and petitioned through the state. With Brazil at the center of this story of economic experimentation, Remaking Capitalism centers the Global South in the longer history of the production of economic thought. Drawing comparisons with the United States, Italy, and Portugal, Teixeira offers a transnational history of this important interwar attempt to create a third way between capitalism and communism"--




The Cambridge History of Global Migrations: Volume 2, Migrations, 1800–Present


Book Description

Volume II presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between 'skilled' and 'unskilled' workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.







The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History


Book Description

Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.




Bossa Mundo


Book Description

Brazilian music has been central to Brazil's national brand in the U.S. and U.K. since the early 1960s. From bossa nova in 1960s jazz and film, through the 1970s fusion and funk scenes, the world music boom of the late 1980s and the bossa nova remix revival at the turn of the millennium, and on to Brazilian musical distribution and branding in the streaming music era, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries focuses on watershed moments of musical breakthrough, exploring what the music may have represented in a particular historical moment alongside its deeper cultural impact. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, author K. E. Goldschmitt argues for a shift in scholarly focus--from viewing music as simply a representation of Otherness to taking into account the broader media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have conflicting priorities. Goldschmitt demonstrates that the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil. Like other culturally rich countries in Latin America--such as Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina--Brazil has captured the imagination of people in many parts of the world through its music, driving tourism and international financial investment, while increasing the country's prominence on the world stage Nevertheless, stereotypes of Brazilian music persist, especially those that valorize racial difference. Featuring interviews with key figures in the transnational circulation of Brazilian music, and in-depth discussions of well-known Brazilian musicians alongside artists who redefine what it means to be a Brazilian musician in the twenty-first century, Bossa Mundo shows the pernicious effects of branding racial diversity on musicians and audiences alike.




Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Two


Book Description

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions, resulting in mélanges and hybridization. The volume also invites reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens. Contributors include: Diana Mishkova, Alexander Vezenkov, Constantin Iordachi, Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov, Blagovest Njagulov.




Sugarcane Labor Migration in Brazil


Book Description

This book examines the experiences of seasonal, migrant sugarcane workers in Brazil, analyzing the deep-seated inequalities pervasive in contemporary Brazil. Education, employment, income, health, and relative political power are forefront in this study of the living and working conditions of the transient population. Based on ten years of qualitative research dominated by in-depth interviews with migrant sugarcane workers, this project argues that the ills of the sugarcane industry are symptomatic of an overarching problem of unequal access to opportunities by all Brazilian citizens. The project is unique in its use of a single industry as an expression of the multifarious problems of socioeconomic, regional, and racial inequality. The author explores details of the labor migration experience with a central premise that the conditions are not a direct outcome of the industry, but rather a manifestation of fundamental inequalities rooted in Brazil’s colonial history.