In late September 2016, the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hosted a symposium on regionalism in Brazilian history to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Professor Joseph L. Love's arrival at Illinois. Organized by the Institute's director, Professor Jerry Dávila, the symposium brought together historians from the United States and Brazil for a day-long discussion of an issue that continues to attract scholarly attention in both countries. Love himself contributed to the study of Brazilian regionalism with two landmark studies: Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971) and São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1980). The latter was produced alongside John Wirth's Minas Gerais in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1977) and Robert Levine's Pernambuco in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1978) as part of a larger project conceived and carried out through a decade's worth of unprecedentedly close collaboration.Footnote 1 At Illinois, Love inspired hundreds of undergraduates with his award-winning teaching and trained a bi-national cohort of graduate students who have gone on to careers of great distinction in Brazil and in the United States.
The event also served as prompt to a broader conversation between Love and three historians whose lives and scholarship have been touched or otherwise inspired by his work. Zephyr Frank, Professor of History at Stanford University, was an advisee of Love's at Illinois whose dissertation, “The Brazilian Far West: Frontier Development in Mato Grosso, 1870–1937” (1999), bore the imprint of his advisor's approach to regionalism. The work of Glen Goodman, Assistant Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, on identity in Rio Grande do Sul returns to the site of Love's earliest researches in Brazil. James Woodard is Professor of History at Montclair State University; his first book, A Place in Politics: São Paulo, Brazil: From Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt (2009), was written in dialogue with Love's São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation.Footnote 2
On September 29, 2016, the four historians sat down for an in-depth discussion that ranged across Love's education and career, including his work on Brazilian regionalism and beyond. Also covered in the conversation were Love's impressions of Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s and changes in the Brazilian and North American historical fields since then; his turn to the study of economic ideas in Latin America and Rumania; the continued relevance of the center-periphery model within Brazil and in Latin America's relations with the outside world; and his accidental interest in a Brazilian naval mutiny of 1910, a subject once relegated to historiographical oblivion that has recently yielded a flurry of important monographs, including Love's own The Revolt of the Whip (2012).Footnote 3 The resulting conversation does not—could not—do justice to the whole of Love's trajectory, skirting such subjects as his work's considerable impact in Brazil and omitting several of his most important publications, including his masterful contribution to the Cambridge History of Latin America, “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930” (1995).Footnote 4 It does, however, offer specialists and non-specialists alike unique insight into the unfolding of an intellectual journey marked by singularly wide-ranging interests and lasting contributions to Latin American history in general and Brazilian history in particular.
What first brought you to the study of Latin America in general and Brazil in particular?
As a Harvard undergraduate, I started out in a major called history and literature, but in my junior year I switched to economics. It was my UIUC colleague Werner Baer, since deceased, who gave me the examination to get into the economics program in 1958, so the two of us go back a long way. I had become interested in Latin America during my sophomore year in college, and took a graduate history seminar one summer at the University of Texas-Austin with Tom McGann, who had recently come to Texas from Harvard. I also took some other courses in basic economics and Spanish there, in a couple of summer sessions, as Austin was my hometown.Footnote 5
Brazilian politics was quite volatile in the late 1950s. Francisco Julião was organizing peasant leagues in Northeast Brazil, and for US media he represented the dangers of a second Cuba, just as Fidel was in the process of linking his revolution to Moscow. I had studied Portuguese in college and wrote an undergraduate thesis on a problem in economic development with Edward Mason, one of the pioneers of this new subfield in the discipline.
A lot was going on in the Brazilian economy during the Jucelino Kubitschek years (1956-61). I wrote an undergraduate thesis on Brazil's economy in 1959-60. At that point Brazil was growing at 5 percent per year, leading the major Latin American countries. Beyond economics, there was a political crisis in Brazil following the resignation of Jânio da Silva Quadros in August, 1961. At the same time, Paulo Freire's works were gaining attention beyond Northeast Brazil, where he had launched his method of raising political consciousness while teaching literacy skills to adult workers and peasants. In early 1960 I saw Marcel Camus's movie Black Orpheus, a wonderfully romantic movie that brought bossa nova to the attention of North American audiences. Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz popularized bossa nova in the United States after their Brazilian tour in 1961.
I began graduate school in economics at Stanford in 1961, and after a quarter I decided to go into history. I felt that I was not a good enough mathematician to do well in the field, given the direction that economics was then moving in. With only a year of calculus, I was behind the curve of first-year grad students at Stanford. Kenneth Arrow, later the winner of the Nobel Prize, was probably the best known mathematical economist at Stanford at that time.
What inspired you to move from Stanford to Columbia for the remainder of your graduate studies in history?
When I went to Stanford, there was only one professor of Latin American history, John J. Johnson. He was also probably the only Latin Americanist of any distinction on campus—very great distinction—but no one worked on Brazil in particular. Columbia University had a lot more going on Brazil-wise than Stanford did at that moment, but that situation changed shortly after I left the West Coast. At Stanford, there was a strong rivalry between Ronald Hilton, who ran the Hispanic American Institute, and Johnson. Hilton produced a monthly news magazine based on clippings from Latin American newspapers. A year or two after I left, Hilton resigned from Bolívar House, Stanford's Latin American center, which he had developed. John Johnson took over, and that was the beginning of the contemporary Latin America program at Stanford. He was the driving force, I believe, in Stanford's winning a very large program grant from the Ford Foundation.
I have to say that Hilton, though not a great scholar, was an enterprising academic. His monthly magazine, the Hispanic American Report, achieved a journalistic coup despite the fact that the events it covered were two months older than the publication date on the magazine! Included in the report was the fact that Cuban exiles in Guatemala were organizing for the invasion of Cuba, before that undertaking ever got into the major newspapers. It was not because other media didn't know about the planned assault, but rather that President Kennedy had convinced the standard media to remain silent.Footnote 6
In the early sixties I thought Columbia was the place to study Latin America history, and Brazil in particular. They had Marvin Harris and Charles Wagley in Anthropology. Also at Columbia I took a course with Stanley Stein on Brazil. He had never given such a course at Princeton, his home institution, for lack of sufficient enrollment, but there were enough students at Columbia to justify a graduate course.
What Columbia didn't have at the time was a historian of Brazil, although they later had Bradford Burns, followed by Herbert Klein. Lewis Hanke, a specialist on sixteenth-century Latin America, was my dissertation director. The most influential professor I had at Columbia was, in fact, not a Brazilianist (though I took Charles Wagley's course), but Juan José Linz, a Spaniard working principally on Spain. Yet, he was a comparativist knowledgeable about Latin America. I took his seminar on authoritarianism, a regime model he developed, in an opposite direction from Joseph Schumpeter's sketch of democracy in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy and Carl Friedrich's model of totalitarianism.Footnote 7 Authoritarianism, located between the two, was the prevailing regime around the world at that time. Alfred Stepan, who later became Linz's co-author, was in Linz's class, as were Ralph della Cava, Peter H. Smith, and Harry Makler. Stuart Schwartz, Michael Hall, and Peter Eisenberg were also students at Columbia. The three became historians of Brazil, but I don't know whether they studied with Linz.
Linz was an outstanding teacher in an unusual way. Students in his seminar would start their presentations, and Linz would ask a question about the problem they were examining, and the answer evinced another question and other observations by Linz. Pretty soon we were all taking notes on Linz's monologue and we'd forget about our reports. Students at Yale told me they had a similar experience in Linz's seminars after he went there. He had an encyclopedic mind and could compare the Hungarian case with the Norwegian case, and many more. Linz also had range, writing on many subjects, some of them historical. I can't help but wonder whether his essay making a case for parliamentary rule, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” will be granted a close second look under the Trump regime.Footnote 8
In the mid 1960s Juan Linz wrote an article with Armando de Miguel that influenced my thinking about Brazil. In “The Eight Spains,” they regionalized Spain according to social and economic characteristics. It was a regionalization, but not based on contiguous geographic spaces. Rather, the regions were based on areas sharing similar sociological characteristics. Linz opened my eyes to the social science possibilities that could be applied to Brazil as well as to Spain.Footnote 9 He was then a bachelor, and following the seminar a half-dozen of us would accompany him to a pizzeria on Amsterdam Avenue for follow-up conversations.
You have often drawn on literary texts in your teaching and your research. is that something that you learned from Stein and others in your own training?
I love literature, though I try to slip it in unobtrusively. I try to use it sparingly in my writing, but when it seems appropriate. I'm certainly not omni-competent across a wide range of disciplines, but I do like to read novels, and I believe they provide a perspective on particular circumstances in which people lived. In novels you can often get an appreciation for the irony of certain situations that can't be expressed as well in straightforward historiography. But mostly I just liked to read literature, and I thought students would benefit from it too. For instance, I discovered Machado de Assis by serendipity, wandering through the Harvard undergraduate library. Would you believe his only translated novel in the 1950s was Epitaph of a Small Winner (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas), and it was little known.Footnote 10 Susan Sontag discovered it more than a decade later, and she helped make Machado a well-known novelist in the United States.
What are some of your enduring recollections about your early days as a brasilianista?
I like to say I'm an “hijo de Fidel” in the regard that when I started studying at the graduate level, Fidel had only recently come to power. I had heard him speak at the Harvard Law School in spring 1959. For the first time in 1961 or 1962 the Ford Foundation made fellowships available for studying Latin America, and it was because of Fidel and the threat of communism. Before that, Ford had offered fellowships for Africa, Asia, and the Soviet Union, but not Latin America. So in the early 1960s money was flowing and new positions in Latin American history were being created. Brazil, furthermore, was mostly uncharted territory. I'd hazard that half or more of the Latin American specialists studied Mexico in the years around 1960.
I was about to take my preliminary exams in Latin American history when the coup d'état occurred in Brazil in March 1964, setting up a military dictatorship that lasted a generation. That was a terrible blow to political discourse, because political debates were cut short and leftist and progressive voices were silenced. I had been in Brazil a couple of times in the early 1960s, but when I arrived in Rio for dissertation research in fall 1964, the political climate was stifling. The national student union had been closed down, the farmworkers' union had been broken up, the labor unions had been purged, and Paulo Freire's literacy programs, emphasizing conscientização, had been terminated. Few people wanted to talk about their political involvement.
I was a member of the “onda” generation, in that we were seen as constituting an invading wave, even as few as we were. A number of us came to Brazil between 1963 and 1965. Brazilians were suspicious of foreigners, and the word ‘Brasilianista’ had just been invented. It had a kind of unpleasant odor. But I would say, nonetheless, there wasn't any problem about forming professional relationships with Brazilian researchers. Ironically, at that moment there were probably five or more times as many US academics who worked on Mexico as those who focused on Brazil. But the “wave” of a dozen American students over three or four years in the mid 1960s was something new for Brazilians. Before my generation, there were two towering figures in Brazilian studies—Richard Morse and Stanley Stein—and then came three distinguished members of a new generation: Warren Dean, Tom Skidmore, and Richard Graham. The field attracted new talent in the early sixties.
Several Brazilian scholars generously helped me ground my research. I think in particular of José Honório Rodrigues during my first stay in Brazil. He had just spent a semester at Columbia. I was also warmly received by Francisco de Assis Barbosa, who had written a biography of Kubitschek, and Raymundo Faoro, author of Os Donos do Poder.Footnote 11 They and others welcomed the North American Brazilianists into their homes.
Conditions in Brazil got worse in the mid 1960s with the arrival of General Artur da Costa e Silva and the subsequent coup within the coup, that is, the hardening of the military dictatorship in 1968 in response to incipient urban guerilla warfare led by Carlos Marighella. The year 1968 witnessed student protests across Latin America and Europe. I had spent a year in Brazil in 1964-65 and came back again for another in 1969-70, the first year largely in Porto Alegre and the second in São Paulo. Things were very dicey during my second stay, but the intensified repression allowed me to make a lot of friendships with academics. Caio Prado Júnior was incarcerated a few days after I met him in September 1969. I was able to send him books through Professor Maria Odila Silva Dias at the University of São Paulo; he especially enjoyed William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner.Footnote 12
I remember giving a party toward the end of 1969, to which I had invited Emilia Viotti da Costa, Boris Fausto, and Octavio Ianni, among others. The three didn't come, and I wondered why. I learned the next day that all had been arrested. Like other American researchers, I tried to get the word out, and the Brazilian Information Bulletin reported the ongoing story. Herb Klein played a big role in that effort. A few professors were tortured, and at least half a dozen people in the social sciences lost their jobs, including Emilia Viotti da Costa. At my invitation, Emilia came to teach at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1970. Mike Hall had previously invited her to teach at Tulane, and she later got a permanent position at Yale.
Much of your early scholarship focused on regions of Brazil, first Rio Grande do Sul and later São Paulo, as part of the three-book project with John Wirth and Robert Levine. Where did your interest in regionalism begin?
I developed the project on Rio Grande do Sul because I was interested in the First Republic (1889–1930), and I didn't think that everything had been said about regionalism. The Minas-São Paulo axis was the cornerstone of the whole system, but I showed that, beginning in 1910, Rio Grande do Sul began to intervene in the system and eventually overthrew it. In the presidential elections of 1910, 1922, and 1930, Rio Grande played a decisive role, bringing Governor Getúlio Vargas to power as dictator and president of Brazil from 1930 to 1945.
The second project originated when Wirth, Levine, and I were at Columbia. I was studying at Columbia, Wirth at Stanford, and Levine at Princeton, but they both came to New York to take Stein's course. As I said, money was flowing, and since we were at the same stage on the same career track, each looking for a project for the second book, we were able to go to Brazil for a year at the same time, in September 1969. John Wirth suggested the joint project, and I had written the book on Rio Grande, so we decided to look at regionalism in a broader perspective, examining the roles of Minas and São Paulo (obvious choices) and a representative state of the Northeast. With some sacrifice, Levine agreed to work on Pernambuco, while I wanted São Paulo, and Wirth wanted Minas Gerais. We were extremely fortunate in being at the same stage. Before going, we had an informal seminar at Stony Brook, where Levine was teaching, and met three times during our stay in Brazil. After our return, we held follow-up meetings at Stanford and the University of Texas. Each of these institutions gave us seminar facilities.
In the three-volume work we tried to do something unique: working with a common format for thematic chapters and subchapters. For the time, perhaps the greatest innovation was our quantitative study of political elites, adopting common definitions of terms like fazendeiro, banker, and magistrate, and studying three generations of politicians. We also looked at kinship and business networks among the state political elites, and used common definitions and deflators for budgetary data. Dare I say that the three volumes constituted one of the largest formally comparative projects in US historiography for any subject area? I'll say it.
Something unusual was organizing the chapters in a thematic way, treating each theme (for example, internal state political dynamics or interaction of state and federal governments) over a 40-year period in a single chapter. So, geography and regions and sub-regions was a chapter, economy was a chapter, society a chapter, and so forth. We tried to do some experimental things, of which the study of the integration of state and national political cultures was necessarily the most speculative. You have to be speculative about where political loyalties lie, and to what extent the sum of loyalties shifted from the states to the nation during the republic.
Regional loyalty is an important issue, and it keeps coming up. I think of my home state of Texas, where a few years ago former governor Rick Perry hinted that he might want to declare Texas an independent republic. Do loyalties to the state and the nation necessarily conflict? I don't think they have to. If Texans ever wanted to be independent, they wouldn't get very far, because the largest military base in the world is at Fort Hood, Texas. The Texans can be compared to the gaúchos in many ways. Texas is a border state facing a Spanish-speaking nation, as was Rio Grande do Sul. Both had slave regimes, and both bordered countries where slavery no longer existed. Texas and Rio Grande do Sul were independent states for nearly the same period—Texas in 1836-45, and Rio Grande in 1835-45. On this topic there's a braggadocio (fanfarrão) in both cultures.
Are there distinctive mineiro and pernambucano or Northeastern personalities? I think it's pretty obvious that there are, and we hardly need to say that for the paulistas and gaúchos. Levine, Wirth, and I tried to explore that issue. If I were pernambucano in the Old Republic, the first thing I'd want to do would be to get out of the place and go to Rio! That attitude affected mineiros less and in a different way, I think. Erico Veríssimo in the last volume of O Tempo e o Vento talks about gaúchos arriving in Rio in cowboy boots, and as Gilberto Amado put it, “with guns on their hips as if they were great tumors.”Footnote 13 Nowadays, however, ostensible regionalism in Brazil may be primarily confined to cuisine.
What further contributions do you see regional approaches making to Brazilian historiography?
In addition to the studies of Rio Grande, São Paulo, Minas, and Pernambuco, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira has written a history of the state of Rio in the First Republic, A Republica na Velha Provincia.Footnote 14 But the best book on a state/region in Brazil is Katia de Queiros Mattoso's Bahia, Seculo XIX, a dissertation for the doctorat d'état at the Sorbonne, a degree that no longer exists.Footnote 15 The dissertation took her 20 years to complete, a time span typically associated with that degree. In it she dealt with the Bahia's geography, communications and transport, demography, family, religion, and government.
For the Republican era, we have Eul-Soo Pang's Bahia in the First Brazilian Republic, the first study to penetrate the archives of backlands coroneis, and Linda Lewin's superb Politics and Parentela in Paraiba.Footnote 16 But we still lack a study of the Federal District, and the politics and economy of the national capital. Such a work should treat the interaction of center and periphery and the transmission of forces in both directions. One might also ask, what happens to the politicians when they arrive in Rio? Do mineiros become cariocas, while paulistas and rio-grandenses maintain their regional perspectives? I recall the republican constituent assembly debates of 1890-91 in which future president Epitácio Pessoa declared, “The interests of Brazil are the sum of the interests of the states.” It didn't work that way in practice. As president, Epitacio undertook an ambitious array of public works projects for the Northeast, but his successor, Artur Bernardes, dropped everything, leaving the dams and other projects half completed.
If I can indulge in a little ego historia, as Boris Fausto calls it, I believe Levine, Wirth, and I weren't looking at regional history as such, but rather at the relationship between the center and the periphery, the provinces and the capital, trying to see which way things were moving. The longer-term trend was toward a more centralized political system. That's why we ended our studies in 1937 rather than 1930. In the thirties São Paulo remained quite defiant, as Barbara Weinstein emphasized in her 2015 book The Color of Modernity.Footnote 17 I think regionalism is a topic that still has viability. Regionalism and federalism are imbricated, of course, and it is not an accident that every constitution since that of 1891 (including the constitution of the Estado Novo) declares Brazil to be a federal republic. I like to think that there is some continuity in my interests in moving from regionalism and federalism to internal colonialism. I have an article on that subject as a theoretical problem in World Development.Footnote 18 A leading theorizer of internal colonialism, though he didn't use the term, was the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado.
Much of your work has used the center-periphery lens to discuss political and economic relations, particularly in terms of economic development and the formulation of the “Third World.” What are the advantages of this approach, in your view?
One indication of the utility of this perspective is that certified econometric historians have begun to use this center-periphery framework in studying international economic trends. Jeffrey Williamson at Harvard is one of them, John Coatsworth at Columbia is another. So, there is some recognition of the fact that if you want to make sense of the enormous differences in the economic development of the different parts of the world, it makes sense to look at relationships of political as well as economic power.
In the early post-war period things were pretty simple: the United States produced half the world's product, so it made perfect sense for Raúl Prebisch, the founder of the Latin American structuralist school, to use the center/periphery scheme. Now there are centers (in the plural)—countries rising and falling in different regions of the world.
Prebisch, the longtime head of the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), popularized the center-periphery framework, first using the phrase in 1946. Of course, the world has changed enormously since World War II. And in the last 25 years, two billion people have come out of extreme poverty in China and India. Never has anything like that happened in the past. China is moving into something like First-World status, as a political power and in terms of its total product, if not yet in per capita income. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy invented the notion of the Third World in 1952, using the analogy of Abbé Sieyès's description of the Third Estate at the time of the French Revolution: “We are nothing, we could be everything, we want to be something.”Footnote 19
In my book on Rumania and Brazil I was trying to explain the relationship of two areas, Latin America and Eastern Europe, at the moment of the creation of the subdiscipline of development economics.Footnote 20 Of course, there's a lot of controversy about whether the concept of “economic development” is still relevant, but certainly in using the simple notion of per capita income, it's still important to measure levels of industrialization in the Third World as a share of total economic activity.
I think it's especially interesting nowadays to consider the degree of income inequality. In fact, it's hard to keep up with the literature. The degree of inequality in this country will almost certainly grow if President Trump gets his way on tax “reform.” We know from the Panama Papers that huge sums of First-World wealth are hidden in offshore tax havens, so the true extent of inequality can only be estimated. The French economist Thomas Piketty has led the way to show how income inequality is growing on a global basis.
You wrote a response to Peter Worsley saying that the concept of development is older than he claimed it was. Some US-based historians have claimed developmentalism is over, most famously Nick Cullather in his essay “Development: It's History.” In fact, development was actually continuing in Latin America at a time when Cullather and others were looking at the United States, Africa, and Asia.Footnote 21 Does looking at developmentalism from Latin America offer a contrarian perspective?
Thank you for alerting me to that essay, a multifaceted and sophisticated attack on modernization theory. It defends the notion of “divergent idiosyncratic modernities,” pioneered by Joyce Appleby and others, rather than a single final destination for all societies. I am surprised that Cullather doesn't discuss the structuralist school that began with Francois Perroux and Prebisch, especially the latter. He does, however, treat the dependency tradition that grew out of structuralism.
Developmentalism is not exclusively a postwar concern. David Justino recently published a book on developmentalism in nineteenth-century Portugal, where it was called fontismo.Footnote 22 It was an extension of a certain type of liberalism that in the period in question emphasized the role of the state in economic growth. Most of the debate, then as now, concerned what the role of the state should be.
Modern “development theory” had its birth in the decade after World War II, when the subject was studied from the point of view of backward, underdeveloped countries trying to achieve a sustained growth rate of 4 or more percent a year, primarily based on industrialization. There were competing theories, but no consensus. The chief theorists were Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Kurt Mandelbaum, Albert Hirschman, W. Arthur Lewis, and Ragnar Nurkse. The debate continues over the basic issue: whether there was something unique about economically backward countries as a group. On this matter, I have contributed to a forthcoming issue of the History of Political Economy, published at Duke University.Footnote 23
Let's turn to your most recent book, The Revolt of the Whip. How did you first become interested in the Revolta da Chibata?
The events were spectacular—mostly black crews taking over two state-of-the art battleships, as powerful as any ships afloat, to protest against flogging in the last navy to permit it. This book was a labor of love. I was doing research in Paris for the Brazil-Rumania book and looking into the archive of the French Foreign Office, where I found a lot of material on the Revolt of 1910. The captain of the ship on which the revolt broke out, the Minas Gerais, had dinner aboard a French vessel visiting Rio de Janeiro at the time. The French ambassador was present, and their dinner was the captain's last meal.
Little by little, while working on other projects, I looked into archives of the British Foreign Office, the US national archives, the Portuguese archives, and the Brazilian national archives and naval archives—I collected material on the rebellion over three decades. Finally, in 2009, I thought that the time had come to write it up. I presented a paper on the rebellion in Rio in 2010, its centenary year, and published the book two years later. I think I added an international perspective, with respect to both the fast-moving events and the press coverage that followed, using archives and printed sources that other researchers had not. I also delved into what the rebellion and its savage repression meant in the broader racial and social history of Brazil. The first to write about the Chibata was the journalist, Edmar Morel, who got the main facts out in his book of 1960.Footnote 24 The topic then faded into obscurity for a generation, after which dissertations on it started appearing.
Do you have a theory that explains this flurry of interest?
Morel was subjected to an IPM (military police inquiry) during the dictatorship, and it was an effective way of telling people to stay away from the topic. That was one of the reasons it was neglected. But after 2000 younger scholars began to take a serious interest in it as a dissertation project. I interviewed Admiral Hélio Leônico Martins, who wrote a narrative from the official point of view.Footnote 25 It's quite accurate, though he may not cite all the documents that he alone had access to. Despite the fact that the rebellion was a great embarrassment to the Brazilian navy, Martins ended his career as a rear admiral.
Silvia Capanema de Almeida has written the most complete dissertation on the Revolta da Chibata, though the works of Alvaro Pereira do Nascimento, Zachary Morgan, and Jose Miguel Arias Neto are all important contributions.Footnote 26 Zach brought to my attention the fact that prior to the revolt the navy had begun a collection of dossiers on all its personnel, recording racial characteristics and levels of education for each sailor and officer. The problem was that it was episodic, not systematic. The navy began its files in 1909, recorded more in 1910, but then the whole thing fell apart. Still, you get a glimpse of how the admiralty viewed the sailors and the data in the dossiers, though not systematically organized, is valuable. I searched especially for information on the leaders of the revolt, but didn't find their dossiers.
Looking at the state of the field today, what do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the scholarship? What new paths forward would you like to see from young scholars?
One of my complaints about the historiography of Brazil in the United States is that it's somewhat unbalanced. There is so much emphasis on race and color. To a great degree I suppose this is inevitable, because Americans want to know what Brazil can teach Americans about our own history. As the story goes: does the hiring committee want a Brazilianist? Well, OK, as long as he or she tells us about race, and how blacks and whites get along. I think that's a distortion. Race is one of the most important things, but it's not the only important thing. I think you don't have that kind of imbalance in Mexican or Argentine history. And yet I see why American departments focus on “race history” in choosing a Brazilianist. The market makes it the most important thing. That's where the jobs seem to be, and the nature of the market is something every graduate student has to consider.
Unfortunately, economic and econometric history get little attention in economics departments now, and in history they are still out of fashion. I think something could be done with a center-periphery framework on the economy of Brazil, as has been done for the polity. Obviously, it's been very important in the polity, especially if you consider the recent presidents who've come from São Paulo. The center-periphery approach can be traced back to Werner Sombart in volume two of Der Moderne Kapitalismus, but it certainly fits the perception of São Paulo as the economic center and the rest of Brazil as the hinterland.Footnote 27 Regional scientists could presumably teach historians a lot, and we have an excellent one here at Illinois, Geoff Hewings, who has taught dozens of Brazilian graduate students.
History has fashions that change from generation to generation, or more frequently. I think it's important to keep in mind that theories come and go, and they date the work in which they appear. Marxism and other theories play an important role in historiography, but in my opinion historians should apply formal social science theory very selectively. The first thing I notice when I read something written 25 years ago is whether formal theory appears. For example, modes of production was an interesting topic in its day, but no longer. More recently, I think the decline of postmodernism is a cautionary tale about using theory in writing history. Yesterday's theory is today's cliché, for example, the notion of social construction.
Regarding theory and method in the abstract, some years ago the Social Science Research Council asked historians how much they used social science in their writing. One radical historicist replied, “There is no such thing as social science–just people who think there is.” That's going too far, and because my major research interest since the 1990s has concerned the history of economic ideas, I confess to a bias toward social science. Yet theory must be used very carefully and should not be obtrusive.
