Book Description

British influence on nineteenth-century Brazil was so prevalent it gave rise to the complaint that it was 'Londonising our land'. Previously isolated by the Portuguese to control the colony's riches, everything changed with Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 -- King Dom João fled to Brazil and opened its ports to the 'friendly nations' with Britain the chief beneficiary. Gilberto Freyre studies the 'gentle, velvet revolution' produced by a multitude of British manufactures, ideas and habits invading the country, from trams, gas lamps, railways, sewers and glass windows, to beer, hats, bread, butter, afternoon tea, the use of knives and forks and the habit of daily shaving. This pioneering piece of research takes the premise that eminent personages and great events only tell one side of the story, and that to see the influences of one culture on another demands a study of more shadowy characters and 'significant details'. Mechanics, firemen, engineers, sailors, traders and other 'Cinderellas of history' here reveal the less grandiose but more human aspects of cultural influence. Working along lines advocated decades later by historians like Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Davis, Freyre makes the point that apparently minor, irrelevant facts of daily life in the home, in workshops, on the railways and in newspaper advertisements can be an excellent way to access a culture's past. The book is written in Freyre's extremely personal, unorthodox style vivid, sensuous yet colloquial -- which established him as one of the masters of twentieth-century Portuguese prose.