Tom Skidmore was one of
the most important scholars
of Brazilian history
in the United States
to train generations
of students.
And in this regard,
we're honored
to have with us one of
his students from Madison,
Wisconsin, Joel
Wolfe who studies
the impact of modernity,
industrialism,
and trade on Latin American
societies and their politics.
His primary focus
is modern Brazil.
And his most recent publication
was Autos and Progress,
the Brazilian Search for
Modernity, Oxford 2010.
He also published Working
Women, Working Men, Sao Paulo
and the Rise of Brazil's
Industrial Working Class 1900
to 1955 by Duke
University Press, 1993.
And his articles have appeared
in the Latin American Research
Review, Hispanic American
Historical Review,
Radical History Review,
Luso-Brazilian Review,
and [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
He is presently working on
a book tentatively titled
The Global '20s,
Trade and Society
in the Western
Hemisphere in the 1920s.
And we're really honored
to have Joel with us.
He's been a great colleague.
He is at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst
as a professor
where he has trained
excellent undergraduate
students who
have come on to our program.
Sandra Haley, Tammy
Almeda, and Dan McDonald
are three of the other people
he has kind of given us.
And we're really glad that we
would get such high caliber
students for our
graduate program.
But he's also been a really
wonderful scholar and a friend
of at Brown University.
And so it was really
appropriate to invite
him to give the first
Memorial Skidmore lecture.
Joel.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, Jim.
And it is a real
honor to be here.
I just have to fix this.
I think my computer is
going to keep doing things
in the middle of my slides.
So I just want to see
what else is open.
I don't think you
want to read my email.
Or maybe you do.
So anyway, thank you so
much for turning out.
I know that you had the
former president of Brazil
here on Monday.
And I thought a lot about
that and sort of my place
coming after her.
And I thought that
to be Brazilian,
if she was the
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],,
then I'm that little cup
of espresso that you have
afterwards.
Because you really
can't take much more.
But you want to hang out
and have a conversation.
So I think maybe that's
the appropriate metaphor
for following someone as
extraordinary, and significant,
and from what I hear
from everyone who met her
really lovely as [INAUDIBLE].
I want to thank--
well I want to start by saying--
I mean, I have notes.
I'm going to read my notes.
But when Jim asked
me to do this,
I didn't want to
present you archival
research and something narrow.
I wanted to try to say
something broad about Brazil,
in part to honor Tom.
So these are just
some thoughts I
have about thinking
spatially about Brazil
and situating Brazil
in the hemisphere.
So I want to thank Jim, who is
a dear friend and colleague,
and the Department of History
and the Watson Institute,
and the Brazil Initiative
here at Brown, which is really
an extraordinary thing and
something you should all
thank your lucky
stars you're part of.
And I'm particularly honored
to deliver the inaugural Thomas
Skidmore Memorial Lecture.
Now, when Jim
invited me here, he
asked me, very diplomatically,
as one does with an old friend,
to make sure that I
spoke about Brazil.
And that may seem odd.
I went to the
University of Wisconsin
explicitly to work with
Tom and also with Florencia
Mallon and Steve Stern.
But I went to work on Brazil.
And my dissertation became
my first book, which
Jim mentioned, on Sao Paulo.
And I've written more
articles about Getulio Vargas
than I could probably count.
In fact, I owe Oxford
University Press
a blog post about
Getulio Vargas.
I'm not really sure
how one writes a blog
post about Getulio Vargas.
But I agreed to it.
I was flattered.
My second book,
as Jim mentioned,
is a re-interpretation of modern
Brazil through automobility.
I understand some
of you have read it.
If you enjoyed it, that's great.
If not, take that
up with Oxford.
I don't give refunds.
But the reason Jim asked
me to focus on Brazil
is I am now writing this book
about the entire hemisphere.
And I think he kind
of quietly worried
that I might go off on a tangent
about the export of asbestos
from Quebec or the
1919 Edge Act, which
was key in allowing
US foreign branch
banking in Latin America.
So I know you all want
to hear more about that.
And we can talk
about that later.
Obviously, we won't.
What I'd like to talk about
is Brazil's great size
and its geography and
how that geography
has shaped its modern history.
And my thesis is very
basic and straightforward.
It's that Brazil's
massive size is not
just the context
for understanding
its history of regionalism
and a weak central state,
it's a driver of those things.
And so I am saying
something that people
said in the 19th century in a
very different and very racist
way.
And I don't mean
it to be like that.
But I'm saying that
Brazil's geography really
was, in many ways, its destiny.
And it's important to ask
if this is a new idea.
And is it important?
And interestingly, what
I'll tell you is it's
actually a very
old idea that comes
from some of the first
writings in what we
could call the modern
historiography of Brazil.
And yes, I think
it's important and I
hope to kind of prove that.
So there's Brazil.
Brazil dominates South America.
We all know that.
But I think it's important
to demonstrate its sheer size
with a map that appeared
first in Brad Burn's
History of Brazil and then
later in Tom Skidmore's book
that many of you have seen.
And that's Europe fitting
comfortably within the borders
of Brazil.
From the earliest
days, the Portuguese
were really not
that clear what they
were going to do about Brazil.
And this is a picture of
the so-called captaincies,
which were the colonial units.
And Patricia Seed,
who was my colleague
when I taught at Rice, wrote
a really brilliant book
called Ceremonies of Possession
that some of you may know.
And what she talked
about in this book
is the ways that different
European powers took the land
in this hemisphere.
And so the English were
here in New England.
The English would say, you get
from that rock to that tree
to that river.
The Spanish in
Mexico initially gave
grants of people,
the encomienda,
people to be Christianized.
The Brazilians, the
great seafaring people
who really had no idea what
they had, stood on the coast
and used a sextant and marked
off territory and said,
you have from here to there
until the end of the world.
So this was the sort of original
sin of how Brazil was settled.
Now that's not to say that
the Portuguese did not
open new lands.
They often did so in response
to economic opportunities.
But the Portuguese,
famously, the line
was they hugged the
coast like crabs
for much of the colonial era.
They did put some new lands
into sugar production.
And they moved inland at
first, chasing gold and--
you don't really chase
it, you dig it up--
gold and diamonds in
present day Minas Gerais.
Now I can't, on my
computer, see my--
what's the next?
So, I hope this is--
it is right.
It's the Minas slide.
There won't be any
slides of my dog.
I've double checked to make sure
I took the personal ones out.
Indeed, they moved the
capitol from the northeast
to Rio, in part, to have their
meager governmental presence
closer to this major
new source of revenue.
The rise of the center south,
at first through mining
but later through
agriculture, did
attract more people,
more Portuguese people,
than had previously
been in the area.
The development of the cattle
economy along the Sao Francisco
River as well as the penetration
of indigenous lands in Sao
Paulo were long ago
studied by some of Brazil's
pioneering historians.
And as I said, this is a long
ago told but largely forgotten
story.
Brazil's massive
size was first noted
by perhaps Brazil's first modern
historian, Joao Capistrano de
Abreu.
His Capitulos de Historia
Colonial published in 1907
explicitly discusses
these issues.
And then, more to the point, his
later book Os Cominhos Antigos
e o Povoamento de
Brasil, the old roads
and the peopling of Brazil,
which traces the cattle
economy along the Sao
Francisco Valley River
specifically focus
on the importance
of Brazil's geography.
Sergio Buarque de
Holanda is likewise
one of the founders of modern
Brazilian historiography
I wrote, he's best known
for 1936's Raizes do Brasil.
But then I couldn't
help myself and wrote,
he's also very well known as
the father of Chico Buarque.
I think, sadly, he's
probably a better known
as the father of Chico Buarque.
But he wrote Raizes,
which many people consider
the single finest book in
Brazilian history, at least,
produced in that era.
And he later wrote a book called
Caminhos e Fronteiras, which
was about the cultural
aspects of the penetration
of the interior of Sao Paulo.
The point here is
that this topic
was recognized early on by the
people who founded the field.
There are, however, very
understandable reasons
why this topic is not part
of the discussion today.
I think the most important
has to do with the fact
that one of the two big
issues in the Brazilian
historiography, and
there are lots of them,
are slavery and national
politics, the struggle
between dictatorship and
whatever is not dictatorship,
and sometimes democracy.
So looking at slavery,
the issue is really
the nature of Brazilian slavery
or the so-called slave question
in Brazil and how it compares
to the other very geographically
big slaveholding society
in the western hemisphere.
Despite the presence of
slavery in New England
and mid-Atlantic states and
the longevity of slavery
in New York's
Hudson River Valley,
slavery in the United
States was sectional.
And that was exacerbated by the
structure of the US government.
The Senate was made up
of slave and free states.
The house was lopsided
in empowering the South
through the Three
Fifths Compromise.
I'm a Brazilianist.
Although there are many terrific
community studies of slavery,
the nature of US slavery has
more of a national gauge.
If you think about the really
famous big books about slavery
and its aftermath-- and I'm
not endorsing Eugene Genovese's
Roll, Jordan, Roll.
It's a problematic book.
But it has a national focus.
Leon Litwack's Been
in the Storm So Long,
likewise, a national focus
on the aftermath of slavery.
Even Edmund Morgan's
American Slavery,
American m which is
ostensibly about Virginia
is really about the question
of freedom and slavery
in the Americas.
And if you look at the really
great books, the classics--
I'm not going to talk about
recent historiography--
in Brazil, two come to mind.
My favorite is Stanley Stein's
Vassouras, a coffee county.
It is a micro study.
It is a brilliant study.
It's a wonderful book that
holds up 60 years later.
Emilia da Costa's pathbreaking
Da Senzala a Colonia is
a study of Sao Paulo.
Studying slavery is for 19th
century Brazilian history
absolutely fundamental.
But these studies are local.
Even think about Tom's
book, Black into White,
which is not about slavery.
It's about race thought.
And he does cover
many parts of Brazil.
But he isn't thinking-- nor
should he really in this book--
about geography.
The other major topics
in Brazilian history
have a hyperlocal focus.
If you think about
labor history,
they're almost always about
cities, individual industries.
And then with the labor
laws in the 1930s,
the actual unit of measure
is the municipio, the town
or the city.
I can think of two great
works of national scope
in Brazilian history
that we should
talk about today, that
Jim already mentioned,
Tom Skidmore's two books.
And neither of those
would necessarily
talk about geography.
So it's perfectly understandable
why the Brazil historiography
has largely ignored
the nation's geography.
But that doesn't mean
that we should continue
to allow this lacuna to exist.
Adding geography
back in, I think,
can change the way we
look at Brazilian history.
And I just want to warn you.
I am very much a
20th centuryist.
So when I say, look
at Brazilian history,
I mean look at the 20th century.
Having said that, the
colonial era, I think,
is kind of easy to understand
in geographical terms.
It serves as a foreshadowing
of how independent
even modern Brazil
would function
as a disconnected whole.
Settlement and conquest
were always reactive,
not only to new
economic activities
but to real and perceived
foreign threats.
Perhaps the easiest way to
understand the profound impact
of Brazil's geography on
both the colonial period
and the developing
sense of nation
is to think about really its
most important independence
struggle, the
Inconfedencia Mineira.
First of all, it was an
independence movement
influenced by the
American Revolution
and French liberal thought.
But it was only in Minas.
It had no national gaze.
Despite being openly
influenced by the Enlightenment
and the United
States, there was not
an attempt to bring in
other thinkers, other people
from other states.
Indeed, when we
think geographically,
we can see that the
empire and the republic
were part of a clear continuum.
They were obviously important
changes in the 1822 to 1930
period.
Sergio Buarque de
Holanda famously
commented on the golden
law ending slavery,
quote, "The year 1888,
the most decisive year
in the evolution of
the Brazilian people,
divides two epics."
And he's right, certainly.
And Brazil in 1822 and
1930, looked very different.
But thinking
geographically, Brazil
was more alike than different
at the start and end
of that period.
Indeed, we could define
the long 19th century--
or we talk about the
long 19th century
as beginning with the
Prombaline Reforms
and ending with the onset
of the Great Depression.
And it was defined
more than anything else
by the production and
export of commodities,
but in ways that deepened
regionalism and literally
disincentivised the nation
from building a unifying
infrastructure.
Commodities left ports in Belem,
in Salvador, Rio, Santos, Porto
Alegre, and other
coastal cities,
building ties to foreign
markets but not to each other.
At this point, it's
worth saying, OK,
that's just sort of natural.
You're a commodity producer.
Wouldn't that happen?
But if you compare this to
other nations in the hemisphere,
it didn't happen that
way because of geography.
The most obvious case
is, of course, Argentina.
And I would never
in a million years
argue that Argentina
did not have
tremendous conflict between
the Pampas and the port.
But it's an obvious example
of a commodity export
whose internal movement
of goods and people
tied the nation together in ways
that were politically fraught.
19th century clashes between
the Pampas and portenos
show the incredible pull of
this movement of wheat and beef.
Mexico, of course,
had two trade axes
that solidified the place
of Mexico City not only
politically, but economically.
The colonial era of Vera Cruz
to Acapulco, east-west trade,
continued.
And Vera Cruz remained so
important in terms of trade
that it was literally seized
by the European powers
to pay off war debts.
I'm going to talk about
more tariffs later,
but which port would
you seize if you
were to do that in Brazil?
I mean, maybe Santos.
But it's not obvious.
It was really obvious in Mexico.
These trade patterns-- and
Porfirian development and--
I mean, no one can read
this, but if you're
veering to the right, the
big hub there is Monterey.
Porfirian development
deepened these tendencies.
These trade patterns helped
foster strong central
governments in
Argentina and Mexico.
And when I say Mexico, I mean at
the beginning of the Porfirian
period, when the
trade is robust.
The absence of similar patterns
deepened Brazilian regionalism
both during the
empire and republic.
Indeed, the republic's
experiences with the political
tug of war between Minas
Gerais and Sao Paulo,
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
cafe con leite,
the politics of coffee with
milk, was somewhat static.
In other words, it was
Sao Paulo doing its thing.
Minas doing its thing.
It wasn't the coming
together of goods or people.
This Brazilian rivalry was based
on existing economies and trade
patterns rather
than being fostered
by trade and migration.
And this isn't a particularly
good map, but you can see--
and it's not completely
clear, but you
can see that in
general, everything
is moving towards the coast.
So rather than engage in
counterfactual histories
about how Brazilian history
might have unfolded had it
had more navigable
rivers or geography
that concentrated
power in a capital city
similar to Buenos
Aires or Mexico City,
it's simply a fact that
Brazil's long 19th century
was a period of weak
national integration
and extreme regionalism.
Brazil's massive size
and unique trade patterns
shaped both monarchical
and republican politics
that privileged local control
and precluded the establishment
of infrastructure
projects that might
foster national unification.
Indeed, when we consider the
hemisphere's largest nations,
Brazil stands out as the one
that eschewed such integration,
while the United
States was blessed
with a river system that tied
the hinterland to the coast.
It had an impulse
for infrastructure
that goes way back.
As much as the Mississippi
drain commodities
from the Midwest to the
Port of New Orleans,
the building of the Erie
Canal allowed a new access
down the Hudson River
into New York City.
But an even bigger difference
between the United States,
Canada, and even Mexico
on the one hand--
three geographically
large countries
in the hemisphere-- and Brazil
was railroad construction.
Railroads in Brazil, as you
saw on the previous map,
did very little to
connect various cities.
The big point, I mean, veering
from this a little bit,
is that Belem is
sending rubber outward,
Santos is sending
coffee outward.
There isn't a line
of communication
between the Amazon, an Amazonian
port, and a port in the state
of Sao Paulo like Santos.
Now railroads did have
an economic impact.
Bill Summerhill's work on this
shows that it lowered costs,
it decreased friction,
it aided productivity.
But it did not lead to economic
or political integration.
The United States,
Canada, and even Mexico
built transcontinental
railroads that
were as much symbolic forms
of national unification
as they were
infrastructure projects.
They were vague military
and economic justifications.
As Richard White has
demonstrated in his book
Railroaded that the
trans-continentals
in the United States were
often more about stock and bond
manipulation than they
were about moving goods.
But the fact of the matter is
they did involve unification
through infrastructure.
There's a reason train stations
have names like Union Station.
They were to tie
the union together.
And those countries,
like Brazil,
are federal republics,
places where the states have
a lot of political authority.
And so the 20th century economic
policy in those nations was
quite different from Brazil's.
I just want to show you, that's
American railroads by 1890.
Those are just the major ones.
Road building and
rural electrification
of the United States were more
robust and centrally planned.
Even internal migration,
both in the great migration
and the movement of
Okies escaping the Dust
Bowl to California, took place
through lines of communication
that had previously
unified the nation.
The Grand Trunk
railroad in Canada
and the growth of the Canadian
Pacific line as well as
the eventual construction
of the St. Lawrence Seaway
played a similar role.
And as early as the Porfiriato,
the central government
in Mexico coordinated
development policies
among the state's
irrigation projects
in the north to the forced
removal of the Yaqui
to far away Yucatan.
The few national interventions
into Brazil's interior
were in response to social
or political upheaval--
at Canudos in the 1890s,
the Contestado in the 1910s,
and the pursuit of
the press this column
in the 1920s and military and
civilian accounts of movement
into the teare interior
to quell those rebellions
makes clear that the total the
near total absence of winds
of communication from the coast
made these completely separate
places.
Military accounts of both
the Contestado Rebellion
and the pursuit of
the Prestes Column
detail the great social
and economic divide
between the coasts
and spaces that
seemed all but unknown to the
military and urban elites.
One cannot read Euclides
da Cunha's classic account
of Canudos and his almost
neurotic description
of the land and people of the
interior without sensing that
this carioca felt--
this person from
Rio de Janeiro--
felt as if he were on a
completely different planet.
And I do think it's
significant that the title
of his classic
book in Portuguese
is not Rebellion
in the Backlands.
It's Os Sertoes.
He's talking about the land.
Another point of
comparison between the two
of the hemisphere's
geographically largest nations
in the late 19th and
early 20th century
involves immigration
from Europe,
just Europeans for a minute.
European immigrants in
the United States went to
and stayed in urban areas
for a variety of reasons.
Now there were some people
who embraced farming.
I can tell you, I grew up in
fabulous South Jersey not far
from Vineland.
And Vineland, New Jersey
is known for two things.
It's where Mike Trout played
Little League baseball.
And it's filled with
Jewish chicken farmers.
And the expression
Jewish chicken farmer
does not usually come
off people's lips
discussing the United States.
So there are some
European immigrants
from the 1890s and
early 20th century
who went to the rural sector.
But the vast
majority of Europeans
filled eastern and
Midwestern cities.
In Brazil, European
immigrants largely
went to work in agriculture.
Not only in Sao Paolo,
but populating the south,
of Parana, Santa Catarina,
and Rio Grande do Sul.
In fact, one can read
of Jewish farmers
in Rio Grande do
Sul much more often
than reading about Jewish
farmers in the United States.
The point is that as late
as the early 20th century,
Brazil was still seeking to
populate in order to gain
control over its hinterland.
European immigration to Brazil
deepened the concentration
of wealth in the
center and south.
While in the United States,
European immigrants of this era
played a central role in
depressing industrial wages
in the northeast and midwest and
so increased US productivity.
They did that.
And they spread
economic development
throughout the land.
Now given all of this
and given the fact
that Brazilian
politics had deviated
from those of the rest of
that western hemisphere-- now
I want to say when I
wrote wrote that, I
knew what I was thinking.
I wrote it.
But I didn't think it
would be clear to you.
So when I say that
Brazilian politics deviated
from those of the
western hemisphere,
I don't mean on the
big macro question
of dictatorship or democracy.
What I mean is the
actual public policy,
what governments were doing
no matter the structure
of the government.
Public policy in Brazil
was very, very different
from the rest of the hemisphere.
And given that, I
think we need to read
the ascension of Getulio Vargas
and the revolution of 1930
as an attempt to
alter that course
and to create a modern
and unified nation.
But my point is
that we need to read
the revolution as
an even bigger break
than is normally considered.
This reading of the Vargas
years is not completely.
New many see the
revolution as a rupture.
Although there are people who
claim it represents continuity.
I still don't understand
that argument.
It's the nature
and meaning of that
break that I seek to clarify.
I've argued in previous work
that Vargas was ultimately
Brazil's first modernist leader.
And I stand by that.
But I want to dissect
that a little bit
by looking at
Brazilian geography.
We have to start by challenging
the conventional wisdom
about Vargas.
He's understood to
be a centralizer.
I believe he failed in that.
But much of what he
did that was important
allowed future leaders
to use the things
he had created to
help centralize power
in the national capital,
first Rio and then Brazilian.
He's also understood
to have created
a vast array of social
services and benefits
for working people.
As I think I've demonstrated
in other writings,
this simply isn't true.
Perhaps the single
fact I can give
you to dispel the
notion of Getulio Vargas
as the so-called father of the
poor who mobilized and rewarded
labor is that almost
immediately after he was removed
from office in 1945, wildcat
strikes broke out demanding
dramatic increases in
pay to try to recruit
some of people's losses at
the hands of Vargas's wage
squeezes.
Indeed, Vargas returned
to the presidency
as a populist in 1951.
But he faced ongoing
opposition from workers
who continued to
strike and organize
outside the formal
industrial relations system.
I don't have time to go into
all the ways Vargas failed
to deliver real benefits
to working people
or even bring large numbers
of people into the state.
But I can assure you that
by almost any measure,
Vargas addressed the
social question more
in favor of industry and
elites than on behalf
of working people.
But I do think that we
can look at something
like the creation of
the Ministry of Labor
as an example of Vargas's
most significant contributions
to Brazil.
Now, I just contradicted myself.
But people say he created
the Ministry of Labor
and that he brought people in.
That's not my argument.
My argument is that
the Ministry of Labor
was one of the first
things in Brazil
beyond the military and
the post office that
was national in scope.
It had a nominal presence
anywhere people were in unions
because unions were organized
by municipio, town or city.
It was not
particularly effective.
The ministry did not
have a great impact
on national
unification at first.
But it created the structure
for it to gain control over.
In other words, when
we look at Vargas
we have to understand Vargas
was the most important figure
in Brazil from 1930 to 1954.
And at the same time, elsewhere
in the western hemisphere,
leaders were
creating or expanding
major new social welfare
and reform programs.
Vargas was most successful in
addressing Brazil's great size,
weak national government, and
absent national infrastructure.
Recall that in the 1930 to
'54 period, other nations
in the hemisphere succeeded
at least in the near term
in implementing programs that
address directly popular needs.
This is true of Franklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
It's true of William
Lyon MacKenzie King
and the liberals in Canada.
It's certainly true, at least
for six years in Mexico,
during Lazaro Cardenas's rule,
for a decade of popular front
governments in Chile.
And whatever one
thinks of Juan Peron,
he did in fact deliver the goods
at least for the first five
or six years of his government.
Vargas was too busy trying
to assert Rio's control
over the nation to
be able to implement
effective social programs
or an agrarian reform.
I mean, the absence of any
talk of an agrarian reform
during Vargas's years is
something no one talks
about because it's absent.
But its absence is worth noting.
In fact, it's an incredible
aside from what I'm discussing,
but Vargas's biggest spending
during his administration
was to prop up coffee, not
to have an agrarian reform.
So he tried at first to
assert centralized control
through the intervenors
and the establishment
of the Ministry of Labor.
But that failed for
a variety of reasons.
And the most spectacular
reason was the Civil War
launched by Sao Paulo in 1932.
Sao Paulo's the richest,
most powerful state.
And if one were to go
to the military archives
and read the reports
of the generals who
fought against Sao
Paulo, they thought
they were going to lose.
They thought that Sao Paulo
could actually win the war.
Something that very
few people understand
is that part of the deal
between Vargas and Sao
Paulo after
nominally winning was
that Vargas promised that
Sao Paulo's state could
be responsible for
all federal government
activities in its state.
It was an extreme moment of
federalism for Sao Paulo alone.
So right there you can see the
limits of what Vargas could do,
given that Sao Paulo was alone.
But the main fact
here is that Vargas
had to put the cart
before the horse.
He didn't have state capacity
to do the sorts of things
that people in Canada, the
United States, even Mexico,
Chile, and Argentina could.
And I say even, because
obviously Mexico, Argentina,
and Chile were not as wealthy
as the United States and Canada.
Building state capacity
will be arduous.
Another really boring
topic that no one talks
about because it's
really boring.
Well, I actually wrote a
book that involved maybe
the most boring topic ever.
And that's road building.
And I tried not to--
there are two things when you
write about road building.
One, don't be too detailed
because no one cares.
And two, avoid bad metaphors.
Concrete, going down that
path, the road to, et cetera.
But the other thing that's
really even more boring
and gives me a headache,
even though I got a refund,
is taxes.
Brazil didn't have a rational
system of national tax
collection that it would need
to fund any sort of program.
In fact, individual states
controlled many tariffs.
And this deepened ties
between the sites of commodity
production and the consumers
of those commodities abroad.
And just think for
a moment, anyone
who knows any US history, I
know a little US history, when
you say the tariff, you're
talking about perhaps
the single most
important political issue
from reconstruction to
the Great Depression.
Tariffs funded the
national government
and protected industry.
It shaped the American economy.
Brazil did implement
a modest tariff
to promote textile
production in 1890.
And when it faded
finally, Sao Paulo
took over and had a
state based tariff.
Sao Paulo also famously financed
the 1906 coffee valorization
because Rio didn't
have the ability
or interest in doing it.
The Ministry of Labor is
a minor success for Vargas
because it's self-funding.
Everyone has to
pay the union tax.
And that money goes from
Rio back to the local level.
So Vargas did create the
bureaucratic architecture
for central state control
and the Ministry of Labor.
But he had more concrete success
or he laid the groundwork
for more concrete success when
it came to the moving of people
around Brazil.
In 1937, he organized the first
Brazilian governmental attempt
to settle the interior with the
so-called march to the west.
The national
government sponsored
the movement of people
and the building of towns
in the center west states
of Goias, Mato Grosso,
Matto Grosso do Sul,
and Tocantins and north
in the Amazon region in the
states of Acre, Amazonas,
Amapa, Rondonia, and Roraima.
Now those weren't all
states at the time.
The idea was to fill spaces
that were imagined to be empty
and to make them into
Brazilian places.
The march to the west would make
the sparsely populated areas
developed and
hopefully look more
like the center south of
Sao Paulo, Minas, and Rio.
Road building and town
making were requirements
for the march to the west.
But they were
beyond the abilities
of the federal government.
Such programs typically
depend on the transfer
of wealth via national
taxes from richer states.
And Brazil did not have
the capacity or the will
to do that.
Sao Paulo had gone to war
against any level of control.
It certainly wasn't going
to finance road building
outside its state.
FDR had a national
tax system that
allowed him to do things
like the Tennessee Valley
Authority and public works.
In fact, one of the
funniest things I've ever
read about taxes--
there aren't many funny things.
But the DuPonts
were a major force
behind ending prohibition.
And it wasn't because
they liked getting drunk.
It was because they
hated the income tax.
And they thought once
prohibition was gone
and the federal government
had alcohol taxes,
it wouldn't need the income tax.
And when FDR was
elected, DuPont's head
exploded because
he thought, here's
a liberal who's
going to have both.
Because prohibition
ends in 1933.
So FDR, despite the depressed
economy in the United States,
has a system of
generating revenue
from people to the
government into programs.
Juan Peron famously taxed
agricultural exports
to fund urban social programs
and to depress food prices
and therefore raise
the standard of living.
But the march to the west
began really for the first time
in Brazilian history the process
of the national government
moving into the hinterland.
Juscelino Kubitschek
continued this work
was with his ambitious 50
years of progress in 5.
And road building was
a big part of that.
During the 1964 to '85
military dictatorship,
the administration of Emilio
Medici established the Programa
de Integracion Nacional, the
national integration program--
and I'll talk a little bit
more about that in a minute--
which specifically funded road
building and town building
like that laid out by Vargas.
But Vargas wasn't done.
In addition to the
march to the west,
he also revived the Federal
Inspectorate for Works
to Combat Droughts,
which probably
wasn't very popular because
it had a terrible name, IFOCS.
It had been created in 1906.
And it finally had
an infusion of funds
in the early 1920s when there
was an northeastern president
of Brazil, I think the
only northeastern president
at the time, Epitacio Pessoa.
But Vargas refunded this
moribund program specifically
to try to alter the political
and economic geography
of the northeast.
He did other things
that relate to this.
Maybe not at first blush,
but I think they do.
He created Petrobras.
This may not seem as
though it's related
to Brazil's spatial development
but it was more than
simply about national pride
and resource extraction.
The original goals involve
developing advanced production
facilities in the
Brazilian northeast
and a national
oil industry would
facilitate the ongoing
push in automobility.
One more Vargas
innovation that does not
seem at first to be related
to the nation's geography
and uneven development was the
founding of the National Steel
Complex at Volta Redonda.
Its primary goal
was to facilitate
further industrialization,
particularly consumer durables
by breaking the supply
bottleneck created
by importing steel.
But Vargas placed
the steel company
in a unique and symbolically
important location.
It is located in Rio state,
right near the borders
of Sao Paulo and Minas.
Putting Volta Redonda
there not only spurred
further industrial development
in these three states,
it tied them together
economically in ways
that they had not been.
In other words,
before it was just
these places sending
products abroad.
Now it's Volta
Redonda sending steel
to these other places that are
making what we call consumer
durables-- electrodomesticos
and automobiles--
and selling them in Brazil.
It's important to understand
how badly connected
these areas were.
And some of you who read my book
know a little bit about this.
Minas had had a road connecting
Rio in the 19th century,
the famous Uniao e Industria,
which connected Juiz de
Fora to Petropolis,
not even Rio de Janeiro
but the city of Petropolis.
And then the Auto Club of Rio
privately financed the road
in 1920 to connect Petropolis
to the city of Rio.
This road is actually discussed
in the movie Notorious.
It's how they're going
to bump someone off,
the road is considered so bad.
It's a Hitchcock movie.
But the point here is that
there's so little road building
in the 1920s that a private
group of rich car owners
have to fund the
building of a road.
But the connections between Rio
and Sao Paulo were even worse.
In 1912, it took 34 days to
drive between Brazil's two
largest and most
important cities.
Nine years earlier
in the United States,
an American in a less good car
drove from Oakland, California
to New York City in 63 days.
Rio and Sao Paulo are 433
kilometers apart today and you
can drive the Rio Dutra--
the Via Dutra, excuse me--
in under six hours.
Oakland to New York City
is 4,667 kilometers.
And if you drove straight and
had an endless supply of gas,
you could do it in 42 hours.
Sao Paulo did build a road
to the Rio border in 1920.
But the Rio government did not
have the money to complete it.
So these areas were
not well connected.
But there was even more
symbolism to Volta Redonda.
It is built in the
land that had once
produced coffee, the very area
that Stanley Stein studied.
So this was an example of a kind
of modern industrial complex
taking over producing
for domestic consumption,
although now Volta
Redonda exports worldwide,
but producing for
domestic consumption
exactly where the kind of
classic commodity export
had been.
There are many more
examples, some quite minor
and others a little
bit more significant,
that show Vargas's concern with
Brazil's spatial development.
On the minor side, something
that perhaps interests only me,
he promulgated the nation's
first unified traffic code.
In terms of symbolic
politics, despite
his nationalist
developmentalism,
he supported and even visited
Henry Ford's plantations
in the Amazon.
He was a major proponent of the
development of the national--
there he is planting a rubber
tree-- the National Aviation
Industry in Brazil.
And he worked closely
with Franklin Roosevelt
during World War
II to help develop
both Amazon and the northeast.
Now this was American
military bases.
But it had long term impacts.
Perhaps the best way to evaluate
the impact of Vargas's focus
is to note how much he shaped
not only Juscelino Kubitschek's
Targets program in the
1950s, but also those
of the military dictatorship.
Zhota Ka, as he was
known, prioritized
a mobile, nationally dispersed
form of developmentalism.
The National Automobile industry
is the most obvious example
of this.
But Brasilia was an
equally obvious form
of spatially oriented
national policy.
The capital was metaphorically
in the middle of a nation--
it's not physically in
the middle of the nation--
and was seen as a major
factor in the moving of people
and economic activity out
of Brazil's center south.
The accompanying large
scale road building program
is yet another component
of Kubitscheck's spatially
oriented national
policy making, as was
the creation of
the Superintendency
for the Development of
the Northeast or Sudene,
which was just the next stage
in the development of such
a spatial policy that
had begun with Vargas's
refunding of IFOCS.
But it's also quite a bit
of the Brazilian military's
developmentalism that has its
roots in Vargas's template.
Medici's Programa de
Integracion Nacional
was the colonization
of the Amazon.
It required massive road
building and the establishment
of new towns and cities.
Medici had called the PIN
as the program was known,
quote, "the solution to two
problems-- men without land
in the northeast and land
without men in the Amazon."
Now, the second part is,
of course, ludicrous.
There were men and
women in the Amazon.
But they were indigenous people.
As much as the
development of the Amazon
was a military program
for mobility, so too
was the development of the
national ethanol program
during the administration
of Ernesto Geisel.
This, like Volta
Redonda, tied Brazil's
traditional agricultural sector
to modernity, specifically
to mobility and movement, and
brought great federal subsidies
to the hinterland.
Now, when I was finishing
my book Autos and Progress,
I used to joke that it was a
shame that Brazilians embraced
the symbol of the airplane for
national unification and not
the car.
Because if they
had chosen the car,
then Brasilia wouldn't
look like an airplane.
It would look like a car.
And I'd have a really
cool cover for my book.
Now we tend to look at--
so, this is the shape--
the satellite pictures of
Brasilia show the same thing.
We tend to look at Brazil's
obsession with flight
as a sort of hangover from the
long held but clearly debunked
belief that Santos-Dumont
had invented the airplane.
Air travel is an
obvious tool for dealing
with Brazil's
massive size and now
highly dispersed population.
And it's highly
dispersed, by the way--
I couldn't go into detail,
I would bore you to tears--
because of all of those things
that Vargas and Kubitschek
and the military did.
They allowed for the growth
of intermediate towns
in the interior and
even some big cities.
But air travel and the
development of national
television networks, and
even Brazil's early embrace
of the internet-- early
by global south standards
at least--
are about more than what
they're obviously about.
In other words,
each of these things
serve distinct economic
and or commercial purposes.
But they're also part of
a unique national history
about moving beyond the coast
and the center south of Rio,
Sao Paulo, and Minas.
Other geographically big
nations in the hemisphere
have histories shaped
by expansion, conquest,
and migration, and
the construction
of ever more sophisticated
communications
and transportation networks.
But those other countries
conquest, settlement,
immigration, and
migration shaped
their political and
economic geographies.
In other words, geography
and much of the hemisphere,
particularly in the
larger countries,
has been more context
than anything else.
But Brazil's been different.
Given Brazil's size
and distinct geography
and given its patterns of
initial conquest and settlement
and its long 19th century of
extraction without unification,
the taking of commodities and
tying commodity production
to areas where they are
consumed rather than tying parts
of Brazil together--
given all of that,
Brazil's geography has been
more of a driver of the nation's
history than merely
its context, making
its colonial, 19th
and 20th centuries
distinct in significant
ways from the histories
of other nations
of the hemisphere.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Feel free to field
the questions.
Yeah.
What'd you say?
Field the questions.
Yeah, right.
That's what I was going to do.
I'm now fielding questions.
Forgive me for reading.
And I tend not to
read my lecture notes,
at least three people
can attest to that.
But I just wrote this.
So it's very new to me.
Young Tammy?
I was wondering
if you could speak
a little bit about the
theoretical groundings
to your work and your
thinking spatial history.
That's a really great question.
And we should reveal, much
like cable television,
I had that question
ahead of time.
But when you asked
me this earlier,
I told you I didn't
know what it was.
And I had to think about that.
And I think that the geographer
who most influenced me
is David Harvey and
Harvey's understanding
of the spatial
components of capitalism.
And I think what's so
interesting about Harvey's work
and if you read it along with
the great English geographer
Doreen Massey--
Harvey's English
too-- that Harvey
tends to think,
not always, but he
tends to think internationally,
spatially internationally.
And I'm trying to think of
Brazil in that same context.
And Massey, I think,
does a nice job of that.
So their work on the
uneven nature of capitalism
is really--
particularly Harvey
is behind this.
But as I said, when
I think about Mexico,
when I think about
Argentina, and even
you could say about
Chile with Valparaiso,
you just sort of think of
things being funneled someplace
and how that connects the nation
and that there is something
unique about Brazil,
where everything just
seems to be going out.
So the idea in my head, which
isn't a theoretical idea,
is that a coffee planter--
well, I'll give you an example.
I know someone whose father is
a very wealthy, very corrupt,
right wing soy bean-- that's
redundant, right-- soybean
farmer in the south of Brazil.
And years and years ago
when I first met him,
he had satellite TV
so he could watch CNBC
because his entire world
view was what was going on
in the midwest of
the United States
relative to the price
of soybeans in China.
And to me, even though that
was in the 1990s or '80s,
that replicated what
I think went on,
that people in Mina and Belem
knew about the rubber market.
But knew nothing about what
was going on in Sao Paulo.
People in Sao Paulo
knew about the price
of coffee in Frankfurt, in
New York, in New Orleans
but really knew
nothing about Salvador.
And that's the sort of
sense, that everything
was just from those places, out.
And that led to a uniquely
uneven kind of capitalism
that then forces Vargas
to have a politics that's
going to be unlike anything
else going on in the hemisphere.
Yeah?
So a couple of points.
So one is that you frame this
as Brazilian exceptionalism.
But if you read, for
instance, Frank Safford's book
for Colombia, Divided
Line, Fragmented Society,
a lot of the
arguments are common.
So I was wondering how much of
this is a Latin American thing
and how much of this
is a Brazilian thing.
And then the other thing
is that you mentioned
in the 19th century there
wasn't much of a nation building
effort.
And I was wondering what was
the role of the World Triple
Alliance.
Because, I mean,
that A, expanded
Brazilian territory and then B,
was a huge national enterprise.
So I was wondering if that
like created some Brazilian--
Those are both good questions.
So Frank Safford's book, I
have to admit, I never read it.
Nancy Applebaum has
sent me her new book,
which is on this, that is
sitting on my desk unread.
So it could be that Colombia
is more like Brazil than--
because I don't think
it's Latin America.
I do think that
Argentina and Mexico are
very different from Brazil, in
this case and perhaps Colombia.
Now the 19th century--
I am a 20th century historian.
And so I do think I
have a warped view
of the 19th century.
And so if I'm wrong,
just tell me I'm wrong
and I won't be insulted.
But my sense of 19th century
nationalism in Brazil
is it's really a passive thing.
I mean, it's around the
figure of the emperor.
It's that we speak Portuguese.
And the War of the
Triple Alliance,
and again, I'm not as
well-read on the War
of the Triple Alliance
as I could be.
But the things that I take from
the War of the Triple Alliance
are more negative than positive,
that you have this divide now
where the military has a very
different view of slavery
after the war.
And it won't chase slaves.
You have the rise of
republicanism coming out
of that, which is
rejecting what had existed.
And I think, and again
I could be wrong.
This is my simple
minded view of it.
I think that there's a
real accounting of how
is it that Paraguay
that has industry
has fought so well for so long.
And that why can't we be
as powerful as Paraguay.
So I think that, yeah, they
win and they get territory
into Mato Grosso.
And lots of positives
come out of the War
of the Triple
Alliance and I'm sure
nationalism and the military as
a national institution, which
is the carrier of nationalism
for better or worse.
But I think that there
are lots of things
that cause Brazil to then
look at itself and say,
this is a really problematic
kind of development.
And the one thing I'd
add to that-- and again,
I mentioned I'm from
outside Philly--
you know, I'm fascinated
by Pedro's visit
to the centennial in 1876.
And he goes to Fairmount Park.
And he sees all
of this machinery.
And I think he wildly
misreads the United States.
Because he says, this was a
slave society 10 years ago.
Well, no, the north that
produced all his machinery
was not.
But he's then questioning
the very society
that he leads both
symbolically and juridically.
So I get your point.
And I could be completely wrong
because it's not something
I'm very well read in.
But I read the War of
the Triple Alliance
as kind of a victory with lots
of harbingers of major change
coming.
Dan, you had a hand out.
Sure.
So for me to say that geography,
mainly Brazil's massive size
influences history is in some
ways to say that landscapes
and physical characteristics
of different regions
constrain and shape human life.
I mean, we can say a very simple
fact that the northeast is
prone to droughts or
above a certain line,
because in Parana,
Santa Catarina,
and [INAUDIBLE] the line--
or below the line and
then above it is coffee.
And that was sort of verging
into Jared Diamond-style
ecological determinism.
Or worse, 19th century
racist geography.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
But I was wondering if you
could comment a little bit
on how Brazil's very landscape
has shaped its history.
Right.
So on the one hand, when I first
studied Brazilian history many,
many years ago, this
was impressed upon me--
the escarpment and how--
unlike the American
Piedmont and the question
of where the rivers went.
So I grew up on
the Delaware River.
And there's of course the Ohio
River and the Mississippi River
and all that.
So yeah, landscape's important.
But my point is not
about the landscape.
My point is about the
political context.
So when you think about this
trip from Oakland to New York
and how they can
do that in 63 days
when you can't go from Rio to
Sao Paulo in half that time.
Part of that is politics, that
the politics of the United
States mean what?
It means that lots of
underpopulated rural states
build lots of roads.
The grange movement is
behind this, that there is--
and there's an impulse towards
national integration, that--
I won't sing, but the
Hamiltonian moment, right?
And that the
Hamiltonians want this.
I don't know who the
Hamiltonians are in Brazil.
So when I--
I probably said this
very thing to you.
That's how boring I am.
So when I teach this
to undergraduates,
one of things I say is what's
fascinating about if you think
about the United
States is that in 1890
if you mailed the letter from
Manhattan to South Dakota,
you paid the same
amount of money
as if you mailed that letter
from Manhattan to Queens.
And that part of that way the
United States was organized
privileged rural sectors.
But what that meant
is the United States
used its kind of image
of how it would develop
to fund this infrastructure, no
matter what the landscape was.
So a much poorer country,
Mexico, but Mexico has--
its national capital happens
to be in the physical center
because that's where the
indigenous people had
their capital because
people would constantly
come from the north and
conquer Tenochtitlan.
But it also meant that when
finally the nation is sort of
exhausted and organized
in the Porfiriato
and there are these lines of
trade that go north and south
and east and west, that Mexico
is the locus of things in a way
that the Porfiriato, in
order to control things,
Porfirio Diaz wants
railroads where
you can put the Federales on
that they can quell a rebellion
and regional elites will
be loyal to Porfirio Diaz.
Yeah, the national government
goes out finally to Canudos.
But that's nothing like
the Federales in Mexico.
So that's why I don't think
I'm talking about landscape,
I'm talking about
the-- and that's
why I start with
the Portuguese--
that the politics
of how they do this,
and then what people
want to do, privilege
individual primary landowners
who just want to export things.
And then Vargas to
create a national nation
has to kind of really just
kind of grab that whole thing
and turn it.
But he doesn't have
the ability to.
So he sets the stage.
And then Kubitschek
and the military
really have new
technologies and more money.
And the miliary does
it dictatorially.
I'm really glad
that you mentioned
the differences between
the European powers
and how they went
and carved out land
once they finally
started colonizing.
But I didn't catch the name
of the [INAUDIBLE] book
that you cited.
It's a woman who is now at UC
Irvine who also was a Skidmore
student, believe or
not, John [INAUDIBLE]
student and Skidmore,
named Patricia Seed.
And it's S-E-E-D. And the book
is Ceremonies of Possession.
And Pat is a complex individual.
And I taught with her
for years at Rice.
And she's someone who
decided that she needed
to know what the Dutch did.
So she learned to read Dutch.
So that's the kind
of intellectual
we're talking about.
Yeah?
I'm just curious about
Brazil's inability
to have a centralized
system of taxes.
And I'm wondering,
given Vargas's populism
and the exploitation of workers
at the time, if you think
a taxing system was possible.
And what would that look like?
Yeah.
Well, there are lots
of things you can tax.
So we tax income.
We tax sales.
We tax imports and exports.
There are sin taxes,
alcohol and cigarette taxes.
The road tax has come
through the tax on gasoline,
that kind of thing.
So Brazil has had such
a terrible system of tax
collection-- still does--
that what happens is there's
so much tax avoidance
that the rates need to go very
high which just encourages
more tax avoidance.
The issue in Brazil
wasn't to tax the workers.
The workers did pay
a tax, the union tax.
But it was more to tax the
wealthy and the professions.
So one of the things I was
lucky enough to get access to
was the internal minutes of
meetings at the Federation
of Industries in Sao Paulo.
And literally they
had so much money--
these guys, during
World War II, which
was a period of great sacrifice
for people, and Brazil
fought in World War II--
that they have this
meeting in which they say,
no one can build a new mansion.
This is really bad.
The PR is terrible.
They also went through
and they discussed
the wages they were paying.
And they were like, how do
people live on these wages.
Now, no one said--
no one had that
fortuitous moment,
like if we pay them more,
they'll buy more things.
So the tax system
would have to go
after people in the
professions and the elite.
But of course, the
vast majority of people
are poor people
and working people.
But the point is that before
the income tax in the United
States, the two main
national sources of revenue
were the tariff
and alcohol taxes.
And in Brazil, the tariff
was often a state tax.
So you have a national
government collecting money.
Yeah?
I have a question about
the railroads in Brazil.
Who financed the construction
of those railroads?
You showed us a map
from about 1890.
Who financed those?
Who built them?
Yeah.
Primarily the English and the
French, but also some Americans
did.
So that actually-- I thought
that might be the case.
And that leads me to the
question of whether, in fact,
the direction of the
development of the country
was really based on domestic
politics and balance of power
between different groups
within the country or was
it really directed from outside.
So the answer is both.
So the argument
is that I think--
Well, certainly both.
But the question is, what's--
I took your presentation to be
very Brazil centric in terms
of mostly you talked about what
was happening within Brazil.
And when you mention
David Harvey,
who you say like, you
said, well, Harvey
is more international.
I'm not so sure if
that's the case.
But nevertheless, some
people would take a much more
international perspective
on the drivers
in the development of
Brazil, that Brazil developed
to serve other interests
than the interests
of the people of Brazil.
I think-- and I agree
with your Harvey, right.
I mean, Harvey covers
a lot of stuff.
And Harvey's written
a million books.
He has a book on Baltimore.
I mean, that's
not international.
I take your point.
So since this is a
Tom Skidmore lecture,
I should make a kind of
personal histiographical point.
I went to graduate
school in 1984.
And I went to graduate
school and the people who
influenced me the most were Tom
and Steve Stern and Florencia
Mallon.
And they all, but particularly
Steve and Florencia,
were part of a generation
that really rejected
dependency theory, which
is the extreme example
of this argument.
Because it, despite people
like Fernando Henrique Cardosa
talking about a
transnational bourgeoisie,
basically put the
driver of history
in the international economy.
And I remember Steve, in a way
that only Steve Stern could do,
because the assumption was, he
said, have you read Capital.
And like three of us
were in reading group.
We read book one of Capital.
And he goes, no,
no not book one.
Book three.
And we're like, no.
Like we've not read book three.
And he's like, well, that's
the problem with Wallerstein
is that he's a book three
capitalist or Marxist
and I'm a book one Marxist.
I mean, I'm looking
at production.
So my kind of
education was to reject
that notion of the international
economy as the driver.
I think that I truly
accept, particularly
in this day and age,
and I'm writing a book
called The Global 20s,
the importance of that.
And I think that what
it was, so I say both,
I don't mean it is a cop out.
I mean that there are--
I look at 19th century
Latin American history
as a group of elites who are now
freed from European control who
want to replicate the colonial
economy with themselves
in charge.
So they want to produce
things that they can then
sell at this point
primarily to Europe.
So I don't think it's
driven internationally.
But I think it's
driven by trade which
involves making those
connections internationally.
And my point is, and
again to get to the end,
is not that that's
unique to Brazil.
But that Brazil's
unique geography
and its legacy of a certain
kind of colonial settlement
and colonial governance
meant that those lines
are from commodity
producing areas directly
to foreign markets and foreign
interlopers or interlockers
like the English
in the coffee trade
rather than being connecting.
But yes, there's a huge
foreign component to it.
It's Brazil's
place in the world.
And Brazilian politics
are then shaping
the spatial development.
But they don't-- oh, sorry.
No.
Go ahead.
But the Europeans don't
control the coffee plantations.
The Brazilian's do.
And they-- yeah.
Right.
And that's--
Wealth comes from the coffee,
not from the railroads.
That's right.
Well, Summerhill, I
think, exaggerates
how much wealth is
generated or productivity
increased by the railroads.
But absolutely, Jim.
And that is an incredibly
important about Brazil,
that if you compare it with
lots of Latin American countries
that produced minerals--
mining or petroleum--
and I don't know, I'm
just going to look at you.
I mean, how many of
the sugar plantations--
I know many of the mills
were US owned in Cuba.
But that's not the
case in Brazil.
Almost everything in Brazil
of these commodities,
there's lots of foreign
capital backing them,
but their produced in Brazil.
And there is a success story
that Sao Paulo's coffee
helps fund Sao Paulo's
industrialization.
But there just isn't a
connection is, I guess,
what I'm trying to say.
Come on.
I made a lot of big
assumptions in here.
You should be able to
challenge more than that.
What was the thing that was
most important about studying
under Tom Skidmore?
I have a really--
an answer comes to mind
directly about that,
that Tom was someone who was
simultaneously brutal and kind
intellectually.
And we had a panel at the
American Historical Association
at Denver where a
bunch of his students
did remembrances and
George Reed Andrews who's
at Pitt, who's a
bit older than I am,
he and I were the only two who
had worked with him in Madison.
Everyone else had worked
with him here at Brown.
And Reed-- he goes by Reed--
Reed and I, our jaws were
agape as we heard story
after story of being at
Tom's condo drinking wine
and laughing and
telling stories.
And I told the story about Tom.
We had to write papers that
were five and 1/2 pages long
in a political economy seminar.
And the first
three or four, it's
my first semester
in grad school,
he gave me the obligatory
graduate school, hey, good job.
And then we read D
S Alejandro's Essays
in Argentine Economic
History, which I'm probably
the only person standing
in this room who could
say I really loved that book.
It's 700 pages long.
And I loved it so much
I wrote a 12 page paper.
And I'm reading the comments.
And it's like, great,
good point, great.
And then on page six,
there's a red line.
It says, did not
read beyond here, F.
And I think that was
kind because it was like,
I'm your advisor, like I'm doing
this almost in a parental way,
like I told you to do
this, and other people are
going to tell you to do this.
I'm not going to-- like,
this isn't a real punishment.
So that was an extraordinary
way of dealing with you.
He also, when I wrote
my dissertation,
I don't know how you work, Jim.
But he always had
a red flair pen.
And I would talk to--
--changing today.
Yeah.
Right.
Things have changed.
I understand there are
different colored flair pens.
And I wrote that women
worked in big factories.
And Tom circled big
and wrote, what is big.
And metal working
shops were small.
What is small?
So there was always
this kind of criticism
that you always knew
came from a great place
but that was about
kind of an exactitude,
that he wanted you to
be exact about things.
And I'll say one
more personal thing--
and I think Saundra
had a question--
is that Tom was really old
fashioned for like a very
deeply political liberal guy.
And when you got to Madison,
he was Professor Skidmore.
And he was Professor Skidmore,
he was Professor Skidmore.
At a certain point after
you passed your exams,
he was still Professor
Skidmore but suddenly
he was a little
chummier with you.
And then he visited
me in the field
and suddenly there was
little bit more gossip.
And I remember after I
got tenure at Williams,
like suddenly he
really told me shit.
I mean, it was kind of amazing.
I'm like, well,
you're the same guy.
And so he just had that kind
of formality, that like,
you're still a pup.
You know, I can't tell you.
I'm not going to scare
you off the field.
And then when you get
tenure, he was like,
let me tell you how
it really works.
Saundra?
Well, I didn't-- not to
beat a dead horse about
the railroads--
You study Mexico.
Yeah.
When I look at the map of the
railroad development in Mexico
and also in the
United States, what I
see are them developed on
top of what were originally
indigenous trade routes.
That's a great point.
And that doesn't really seem
to have happened in Brazil.
Or did it?
And I'm not sure.
I don't know.
So now here is the 20th
century urban historian
talking about indigenous
people in the colonial period.
So you know it's all
going to be great.
My understanding of the vast
majority of indigenous people
who occupy sort of the
coast where Brazil is at
is that they were largely--
and I know I'm exaggerating,
but they were largely
what people say, semi-nomadic.
So that they weren't
completely nomadic.
But they returned to areas.
And they moved.
I don't think that's
completely right,
like John Monteiro's work
on Sao Paulo does say like
there's a reason there's a
subway stop in the middle
of Sao Paulo called
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
I mean, these are
indigenous names
because there really were
people who were settled here.
But I do think, and
I'm very embarrassed,
you know I lived in New Mexico.
I'm very embarrassed I don't
know much about the United
States in this regard.
But clearly, the society in
the Central Valley of Mexico
is so much more
economically developed
than anything in
Brazil before 1500,
that there is no
urban space that
can compare to Tenochtitlan.
There is no sense of trade and
an ethnic and tribal rivalry
as there are between
the [INAUDIBLE]
and the people we call the
Aztecs, and that sort of thing.
But I think that that's
a really great comment.
I mean, I was thinking more
just like the colonial Vera
Cruz and Acapulco.
But absolutely, the
north-south axes,
I do not know that about
the United States at all.
That's a fabulous comment.
Thank you.
So your argument is like,
forget the Portuguese.
It predates the
Portuguese in some ways.
I would say that
most of the railroads
have to do with
coffee and sugar.
And they're not related
to commerce and population
but just where land is cleared.
And indigenous people are thrown
off that land. quite often.
Right.
And are using a lot in
a very different way.
And therefore, that's--
Right.
And again, I mean,
in Mexico, please
correct me if I'm wrong, but in
Mexico where there is obviously
copper and--
although oil, I think,
is mostly on the coast--
but where copper and
other minerals are moved,
there are lots and lots of goods
and lots and lots of people
are moving back and forth.
And eventually a significant
migration back and forth
to the United States,
including the fact
that obviously lots
of the United States
used to be Mexico.
But that's a really great point.
You seem very well-educated
and super smart.
Don't let Saundra's brilliant
comment intimidate you
from making an almost
as brilliant comment.
No?
Well, thank you very
much for having me.
[APPLAUSE]
