Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil [Hardcover]

A nuanced understanding of modernization in nineteenth-century Brazil that demonstrates Brazilian commitment to technological innovation.Offering?a distinctly Brazilian perspective on modernization, Teresa Cribelli counters the notion of nineteenth-century Brazil as merely reactive to models of industrialization and modernization emerging in the North Atlantic. Situating Brazil within a greater trans-Atlantic conversation, Cribelli illustrates the beginning of industrialization and?technological dissemination in a peripheral region.Offering?a distinctly Brazilian perspective on modernization, Teresa Cribelli counters the notion of nineteenth-century Brazil as merely reactive to models of industrialization and modernization emerging in the North Atlantic. Situating Brazil within a greater trans-Atlantic conversation, Cribelli illustrates the beginning of industrialization and?technological dissemination in a peripheral region.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. NineteenthlãŠ