Dynamic Business

  Consuming the USA The second half of the century was a period of global communication and transportation innovation, during which the expansion of steamship lines in the United States inspired tremendous interest in Brazil. Among the transportation innovations introduced to this country during this century, steamboat navigation and the establishment of a national railway system sparked the most excitement among Brazilian liberal thinkers. Along with steam transportation, the US railway system drew appreciation from liberal elites. In the mid-1860s, the mood in Brazil was that: Even though the [U.S.] railway industry never received governmental protection, it remains the most significant achievement of Americans over other peoples in the globe.  As early as the mid-1860s, liberal philosophers began to see a link between laissez faire ideology, the transformative potential of new technology, and the rise of heavy industry, as well as the image of the United States as the new fountain o

  A Aurora Brazileira, Syracuse, 1873-1877. A Aurora Brazileira was another of the monthly periodicals published in the decade of the 1870s in the United States by a group of Brazilians living there  country. This publication is unique in that it was developed by students; its editors were civil and mechanical engineering students from the University of Cornell. In 1875, they resolved to devote the journal entirely to scientific issues; interestingly, several contemporaries saw A Aurora Brazileira as Brazil's first true scientific publication.548 The journal's name referred to the United States, which was regarded as 'the light that attracted so many compatriots in search of more proper teaching than the current Brazilian scenario can supply', according to the first issue, which was published in October 1873.549 Unfortunately, we do not know the complete number of Brazilians studying at US universities over the course of our studies. Nonetheless, despite our limited kno

  Steamship lines serve the United States. Brazil's early gravitation toward the orbit of US production. Introduction Although most historians of the British Empire have overlooked Britain's participation in Latin America, specialists from this region and others have produced a significant number of publications on the subject. Brazilianists' interest with Britain's role in comprehending Brazil's evolution during the nineteenth century is surely a case in point. However, empirical study on British influence in Latin America has generally focused on economic and business relationships rather than political or social issues. As described in the introduction of this thesis, this tendency holds true in the instance of Brazil. This chapter argues that Brazilian economic history has overlooked the economic relevance and cultural influence of the early US commercial presence in Brazil, focusing solely on British supremacy in the country. According to our sources, the Unite

  José Silvestre Rebello, the Brazilian representative to the United States, began negotiations in New York in 1825 to purchase a steam vessel from the New York South America Steam Boat Association, which had recently been formed.  One of Rebello's primary responsibilities was to purchase riverboats suited for navigating the Amazon River. However, the strategies suggested in Rio de Janeiro contrasted with Amazonian interests. On that occasion, the governor of the Amazonian province of Pará refused to allow Rebello's efforts to procure a ship built for the service of Amazon waters to advance up the river.633 After that first attempt, it would be forty-one years before the Amazon fluvial system was opened up for global travel. Despite the failure of this early effort, American merchants remained the most actively engaged foreigners in striving to reduce the barriers to accessing the Amazon basin's riches. Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Virginia-born, self-educated physicist who se

  The diagnosis: Brazilian perceptions of Brazil seen via the mirror of the United States During the 1870s, there was a dispute in high political circles over how to attract a steady flow of foreign workers to meet labor demands in Central-South Brazil's quickly developing coffee districts. This discussion arose in the backdrop of growing emancipationist pressure from both abroad and at home, a movement that took tangible form in September 1871 with the passage of the Law of the Free Birth.414 Two years after the law was approved, the Minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, José Fernandes da Costa Pereira Junior, commissioned João Cardoso de Menezes e Souza, a deputy from the Northern province of Goiás, to devise a plan to attract foreigners to the Brazilian lands to fulfill the dynamic coffee sector's insatiable demand for workers. The assumption was that a constant flow of foreign workers would help to develop the still latent public and private factors of agricu

  Steamship lines serve the United States. Brazil's early gravitation toward the orbit of US production. Introduction Although most historians of the British Empire have overlooked Britain's participation in Latin America, specialists from this region and others have produced a significant number of publications on the subject. Brazilianists' interest with Britain's role in comprehending Brazil's evolution during the nineteenth century is surely a case in point. However, empirical study on British influence in Latin America has generally focused on economic and business relationships rather than political or social issues. As described in the introduction of this thesis, this tendency holds true in the instance of Brazil.6 This chapter argues that Brazilian economic history has overlooked the economic relevance and cultural influence of the early US commercial presence in Brazil, focusing solely on British supremacy in the country. According to our sources, the Unit