In this ambitious volume, Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein make an important contribution to the literature on Brazil's economic and social development. Indeed, the authors make at least three major contributions. First, by summarizing a vast literature and placing it in a coherent political and chronological frame, the authors provide the first comprehensive economic history of Brazil over the period from 1889 to the present. Readers seeking the broad contours of this history presented in clear and compelling fashion need look no further. Second, the book reasserts the importance of demography and demographic change in the study of economic and social life. Building on the authors' shared expertise in this field, the book is filled with demographic data used to help contextualize and explain the significance of economic and social phenomena. Demography, seen in this light, can be the cause of change as well as the context within which change must be interpreted. Third, the book succeeds in placing Brazil in a broad international perspective—importantly, the comparisons are not limited to measures like GDP per head, but extend to social and demographic as well as political matters.

Organized in four long chapters, the book tackles four distinctive moments in Brazil's history: the transition to republican institutions after 1889; the years spent under the populist-authoritarian Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945); the period of fragile democracy followed by authoritarian military rule (1945–1985); and, finally, the period from the return of democratic politics to the present day. Each chapter has its own set of historical themes, but the authors take care to interlace several consistent threads regarding social development, especially as measured by demographic data, throughout the book. In the section focused on the Old Republic (1889–1930), the authors sensibly focus attention on the development of the coffee production and export economy that was ultimately centered in São Paulo state. This chapter shows all of the virtues I have adumbrated in my opening description: multiple measures of economic performance are provided in graphical and tabular form; the distinctive demographic shifts occasioned by the growth of the coffee sector are shown through census data at multiple scales (pp. 28–32); the place of Brazil in the international coffee trade is highlighted and shown to change over time as Brazil seized market share, used market power to manipulate prices and stocks, and ultimately lost some market share as a consequence (pp. 46–47). Luna and Klein also venture an assessment of Brazil's nascent industrialization during this period, showing how wealth and business acumen from the coffee sector was particularly important in generating new industries in São Paulo. The chapter concludes with a brief but informative section on the social consequences of industrialization and urbanization through a discussion of the rise of the labor movement.

A short review does not offer sufficient scope to describe all the sections of this book in the same detail. The second chapter examines the development of Brazil under Vargas and introduces two major new themes: urbanization and the growth of an active state in the realm of economic, especially industrial, policy. Together, these forces, contextualized by demographic factors, set the table for the postwar era. Luna and Klein dissect the fragile democracy of postwar Brazil, its brief period of success under Kubitschek, and its unraveling into authoritarian military rule in their third chapter. Again, a mixture of political history, economic indicators, and demographic data form the backbone of analysis. The themes of urbanization and industrialization are carried forward into an era marked by rapid economic growth (the so-called “miracle” years from 1967–1974) and international turbulence, with oil shocks and debt crises closing out the era in the 1980s. As the authors show in this chapter, many of the processes begun as early as the 1890s (or, it should be mentioned, perhaps well earlier) reached either a maturity or inflection point in the 1970s and 1980s. On the positive side of the ledger, education, health, and welfare measures attained much better levels by the 1980s. As usual, the demographic data are particularly telling. Readers should look at the graphs of birth rates by age cohort for women (pp. 140, 233, and 312) for a very strong picture of demographic transition embedded in a rich narrative of economic and social change. More negatively, inflation and inequality reached unprecedented levels by the 1980s. The transition to a democratic regime in 1984–1985 occurred, therefore, at a very challenging time.

The fourth and final chapter tells the tale of how Brazil navigated through these challenges, first in fits and starts (see Cruzado Plan, pp. 256–57), and then in a robust and sustainable fashion. This process takes root under Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the Real Plan, which finally defeated inflation in the context of an opening economy and widespread privatization. It is solidified and given a populist twist under the government of Lula da Silva and his successor, the current president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. The book closes in a fitting coda, listing the substantial gains achieved in more than a century of development and highlighting some of the remaining challenges, particularly those related to the fine-tuning of a version of social welfare for a developing economy and the enduring challenges of racial discrimination and inequality in South America's largest economy.

No book of this scope is ever truly comprehensive. There are many ways to define the economic and the social. As a reference work and as a synthesis, this book will probably stand as definitive for a generation of readers. With respect to either the archival historian or the quantitative economist, the work is of a different kind of value. It offers the broad framing for more detailed, complex, and meticulous arguments. Rather than being definitive, it should instead be thought of as generative in this light: generative of arguments, ideas, and points of departure.