Scholars and teachers of Brazilian history have long been waiting for a comprehensive English-language survey of the country's twentieth century. The existing texts either devote too little space to the twentieth century as part of their broader chronological sweep or portray it too exclusively through a political lens. Our teaching would greatly benefit from a survey that integrates social, economic and political history and successfully balances attention to the power of underlying structures with a nuanced narrative of key events. In this book, two seasoned economic historians take a stab at this task. For the last 15 years, Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert Klein have been enriching the scholarship on Brazil by bringing their expertise in quantitative analysis to bear on subjects such as the history of slavery and the country's economic and political liberalisation since 1980. Both Slavery in São Paulo (2003) and Brazil since 1980 (2006) have made important contributions by presenting quantitative data that revised existing interpretations. Neither book is a page-turner, but they amply reward the reader's patience, which raises the expectations for this newest collaboration.

Luna and Klein again rely on quantitative data to tell the story in The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889. The book's lifeblood is its more than 100 graphs and 24 tables, not based on original research but rather on a careful selection and thoughtful presentation of previously published data. The book contains all the standard economic, demographic and social indicators that one would expect in such a survey, ranging from industrial capital invested to migration statistics and literacy levels, but it offers greater breadth than similar quantitatively focused works. That is evident in two areas in particular. Luna and Klein place great emphasis on agricultural data and offer important insights on the history of changes in dominant crop regimes. More importantly still, for many indicators the authors highlight regional variations and trace their shifts over time, which serves as a welcome corrective to the notion that national statistics can explain the history of a country as large, complex and regionally unequal as Brazil.

Luna and Klein's approach reflects the authors' commitment to what one may think of as ‘old’ social history, in the tradition of the German Gesellschaftsgeschichte, the French Annales School or the writings of Eric Hobsbawn, with a dose of neoclassical economics mixed in whenever it comes to assessing government policies. That runs counter to the currently prevailing historiographical trends that have shaped most recent Portuguese- and English-language scholarship in the field of Brazilian history. Luna and Klein's approach produces a narrative that is necessarily schematic and lacks the emphasis on the human experience that the new social history has embraced, but it carries a legitimate claim to offering comprehensive coverage. In contrast, a comprehensive survey inspired by the new social history is hard to imagine, so being out of sync with the current historiography may just be what it takes.

Unfortunately, Luna and Klein's execution of the project unnecessarily reinforces the sense that this is a book from another era of scholarship. They rely too exclusively on older literature and largely ignore recent work: other than articles and working papers on narrow economic questions, the footnotes and bibliography cite hardly any titles published in the last 15 years. It may have been a choice not to reference works of the new social history that do not fit the analytical framework, but the authors also miss innovative scholarship that has moved the socio-political narrative of twentieth-century Brazil beyond the schematic portrayals of Cold War area studies. Recent work that questions the easy dichotomy of democracy and authoritarian rule by taking the legal foundations of the Brazilian state seriously would have greatly enriched the analysis. Consequently, Luna and Klein's narrative is vibrant only when it comes to economic questions but rather stale in its social and political analysis. The economic mindset also shines through in interpretive missteps. In the section on the ‘military interregnum’, a very peculiar choice of terms, the text describes the government of the ‘hard-line group’ under President Médici (1969–74) as a ‘relative success’ (p. 186). This is puzzling in light of the preceding paragraph, which characterises Médici's regime as ‘the most closed and repressive military regime in Brazilian history’ and highlights an ‘increasing concentration of income’. Only in a world where macroeconomic indicators were the only relevant measure of effective government would the use of the term ‘success’ make sense.

The teacher of Brazilian history looking for a survey to assign to undergraduates will lament the book's lack of structure. The four main chapters, between 60 and 108 pages in length, have no subheadings to help the reader navigate the content. The chapters' internal logic does not become easily apparent, a problem aggravated by a lack of integration of economic analysis and political narrative. For example in Chapter 3, on ‘Formative Democracies and the Military Interregnum’, the section on the military regime opens (on p. 183) with a seven-page political survey before abruptly jumping back to a parallel, but much longer narrative on the economy and economic policy. Inevitably, politics re-enters the analysis of economic policy, which makes for unnecessary repetition. Moreover, for a survey text, there is too much reporting of data and too little help with its interpretation. How is a reader not already familiar with the intricacies of Brazil's economic history to assess the significance of this wealth of figures? In the end, Luna and Klein have produced more of a reference work than a fluid narrative survey. The wealth of quantitative information on Brazil's twentieth century is most useful to the specialist, but the reader should not expect to find that long-awaited English-language synthesis.