No previous book has so comprehensively treated the history of cattle ranching in Brazil's Mato Grosso region. In the eighteenth century, ranchers began to occupy the abundant rangelands where the Cerrado savanna of interior Brazil meets the Pantanal, an expansive tropical wetland along the headwaters of the Paraguay River. Over the twentieth century, ranching expanded on the basis of introduced grasses, zebu breeds, and other innovations until the region became one of the leading producers of beef in South America. As the book's subtitle indicates, Wilcox argues that the ranchers of the Mato Grosso region pioneered techniques to overcome the many impediments to cattle ranching in the Brazilian tropics. But Wilcox reaches beyond this success to represent the expansion in another dimension: in the 1980s, those techniques facilitated the northward expansion of ranching into the Amazon basin, with immense impacts on native peoples and the environment.

Beyond the overarching thesis that the Mato Grosso region served as the prototype for Amazonian ranching, Wilcox develops three main themes over the book's nine chapters. The first involves economic transformations from the pioneering period of the eighteenth and nineteenth century through the capitalization of ranching that began in 1914, spurred by the completion of the first railway to connect Brazil's western frontier to the Atlantic coast and the contemporaneous wartime boom in demand for beef, leather, and other cattle products. Social relations involving land tenure and ranch labor comprise the second theme, including conflicts between ranchers and native peoples and the accumulation of immense properties by cattle barons. The third theme centers on the environmental dimensions related to the other two, including an excellent analysis of the complexities of rangeland burning. An entire chapter explicates the protracted integration of zebu breeds into the region's ranching ecology, not just the material aspects involved but the discursive conflict between the promoters of traditional taurine breeds with European pedigrees and those who believed that zebu breeds from India were much better suited to tropical rangelands. Eventually the zebu breeds, even a distinctly Brazilian one known as Indubrasil, became dominant across the Mato Grosso region and, later, the Amazon basin. Perhaps no other aspect of the history of ranching in the Mato Grosso region more clearly supports Wilcox's thesis that its ranchers pioneered critical components of a tropical herding ecology that later expanded northward into Amazonia.

Several maps, a detailed glossary, a timeline, extensive endnotes, and a comprehensive index help readers navigate and appreciate this complex story and the voluminous primary sources that underpin it. Tables (but no graphs) detail geographic differences and historical trends in the quantifiable dimensions of ranching: the changing sizes of herds in each district, exports of hides and of head of cattle, land prices, the extent of ranch properties, and many more. In addition, some 20 photographs, either taken by the author or extracted from archives, bring to life the environments, people, cattle, horses, ranches, railways, river ports, and processing plants discussed in the text.

This book's intensive coverage and analysis of economic, social, and environmental issues necessarily limits attention to other, related topics. For example, despite Brazil's prominence in the African Diaspora, Wilcox barely mentions slavery. Nonetheless, he has certainly provided a commendable foundation for research that engages the current interest in Atlantic history, the African Diaspora, and the role of blacks in establishing novel social and environmental relations in the Americas. The details of ranching ecology, in particular, provide a basis for determining whether some of the knowledge and practices involved was brought by the thousands of people of African origin who herded cattle across the Cerrado and in the Pantanal and had had experience in the quite similar environments of the African tropics.