A HISTORY OF BRAZIL

by E. Bradford Burns ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1970

A chronological full sweep by a prominent U.S. specialist. As a reference source it incorporates recent revisionist themes: internal expansion, the harsh side of Brazilian slavery, the bloody intervals in Brazil's peaceful orderly evolution. As a work of scholarly synthesis the book displays a certain intellectual anemia. It is often shallow and diffuse on the colonial period, the politics of the First Empire and republican transition, and the urban society, dubiously termed ""infant,"" of the 19th century. Two super-salient issues are aborted: industrial development and 20th-century politics. The discussions of factors inhibiting industrialization, while sound in shorthand, lack n conscious framework (despite Burns' works on Brazilian historiography). Sometimes he implies a dual-society perspective, while many of his statements in effect support the contradictory view that today's Feudal-seeming sectors are those most tightly linked in the past to the world economy. Burns' scanty reference to British economic domination becomes a glaring blind spot toward U.S. hegemony: his 1930's-through-1960's political history exhibits faux naivete apparent to any alert reader, skirting the Alliance for Progress, the coffee cartel, U.S. interactions with Goulart and the junta (Burns disapproves of the military rulers, by the way, but tells us little about them), and going so far as to edit Vargas' Farewell note of protest against foreign superprofits, and invoking Roberto Campos as ""one economist."" In short, we still lack a satisfactory English-language survey of Brazilian history. . . Poppino's Brazil: The Land and People (1968) is generally slighter and even weaker on recent developments: this is likely to replace it as the standard overview emphasizing socioeconomics rather than cultural anthropology.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1970

ISBN: 0231079559

Page Count: -

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION