Brazil and the USA: Similarities in Urban Development

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  Introduction My dissertation focused on the Brazilian production and reception of representations of the United States as a growing model of modern society in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Based on the analysis of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, diplomatic correspondence, books, students' journals, and textual and pictorial advertisements in newspapers, among other historical documents, my findings indicate that the United States emerged as a new axis of reflection on the meaning of modernity for Brazilians well before the historical break traditionally chosen by historians as a landmark in the development of the United States as a modern world. By doing so, a gap in historiography has been identified: there has been no comprehensive examination of the United States' influence in Brazil previous to that historical watershed, as well as prior to Brazil's first republican regime's open relationship with the US government. My findings also challen
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Exploring the Socioeconomic Similarities Between Brazil and the USA

 

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 of novelty. They emphasized that following the Civil War, the United States began producing items such as steel, iron, and machinery, which created the foundation for spectacular economic expansion while ignoring agricultural and textile productions.

Despite the fact that the imperial and then republican governments played major roles in the development of Brazil's railway systems, and despite the fact that the British were the most prominent foreign investors in railway construction and rolling stock throughout the period, U.S.


Entrepreneurs took on the majority of railway building and steam navigation projects in Brazil after the 1860s.720 Liberal intellectuals had a greater influence in the Empire's cities; yet, the modernizing impulse did not stop there: provincial governments also participated in the propaganda and desire to modernize imperial Brazil's conventional structures. In 1866, André Augusto de Pádua Fleury, governor of the province of Paraná, commissioned German engineers Joseph and Francisco Keller to develop a way to carry rubber from the neighboring province of Mato Grosso in the Amazon jungle to the Atlantic coast. Fluvial communications and a railway line were to be constructed.721 However, after the initial attempt failed, the government turned to US expertise in railway construction. In April 1870, the Brazilian government issued a proclamation authorising Colonel George Earl Church of Massachusetts to Lay a railway in the Madeira and Mamoré River area with the aim of exporting rubber production.722 However, what stands out in this early stage of US economic penetration into the Brazilian market is that the US investment initiatives occurred in situations where there was no other investor. The Viscount of Mauá, who was also a local railway pioneer, couldn't afford to create all of Brazil's transportation infrastructure; he, like other businesses, was credit-constrained. To remedy this gap, Charles B. Greenough of New York established the Companhia de Ferro Carril do Jardim Botânico in 1866, which commenced operations in 1868. A significant Rio de Janeiro newspaper praised the architecture of the trains and the improved comfort of the new transportation invention provided by the US industrialist, stating that the wagons are pleasant and long, and that passengers barely feel the movement.

The infusion of technology innovations into transportation networks conveying the image of comfort, as mentioned in the preceding remark, was reflected in people's daily lives. For radical liberals, improvements in people's daily lives were one of the aspects that the United States' experience of social liberation took. These liberals were also eager to associate the concept of the United States as a location where the ideal of equality was being realized, with the example that material progress, such as comfortable urban or inter-urban travel, could be democratically enjoyed. André Rebouças noted that railways in 722 This concession granted the US entrepreneur exclusive rights to build and operate a railway around the Madeira River basin. Bernardo de Sousa Franco [Pará senator and councillor], Rodrigues, Atas do Conselho de Estado, Vol. 8, 'Ata do 4 de janeiro de 1871', 169. Francisco Foot Hardman's book, Trem Fantasma: A Modernidade na Selva (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988), explores the cultural influence of a railway line in the Amazon jungle on indigenous peoples. For more information on the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railway (1878/9-1907/12), see Neville B. Craig's Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré: História Trágica de uma Expedição (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1947) and Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira's A Ferrovia do Diabo (São Paulo: Ed. Melhoramentos, 1960).

The United States did not enforce the same class divisions as European wagons did. 


Instead of designing various carriages for different social classes, 'Americans with aristocratic pretensions defined themselves by the clothing code'.724 Fact or folklore, the idea that the generic principle of equality, manifested in the concept of comfort, was taking concrete meaning in the daily lives of Americans, and that this was a cultural process unfolding in the United States, was part of the representations of that country and culture elaborated by Brazilian liberal thinkers in the 1870s. Along with railways, the modernising ideology called for the renovation of urban and inter-urban transportation infrastructures along the lines of the new cultural reference, represented by the United States. As a result, in addition to new railway investments from the United States, another important technological novelty introduced by American transport technology was the steam tramway system, a type of urban transportation that appeared in Brazil before any other Latin American or European city. John Stephenson, also from New York, produced the trams. The U.S.-based Brazilian periodicals discussed in chapter 3, especially O Novo Mundo, Revista Industrial, and A Aurora Brazileira, were the primary sources of publicity for US locomotives and wagons, railway material, and heavy machinery aimed at the Brazilian market. Stephenson chose to advertise his equipment in O Novo Mundo, which published his adverts between 1870 and 1879, from the first to the last edition of the journal.725 Stephenson's steam tramway system established high standards for urban mobility in Rio's Zona Sul neighborhood, which spread to other parts of the city and beyond.

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