One of three independent but coordinated studies on Brazilian regionalism, this book examines the complex dynamics of state-level and political structures in the politically important state of Minas Gerais.

Tropical Capitalism traces the rise of Brazil's second largest industrial center, a planned city created in the 1890s as the capital of Minas Gerais, the nation's second most populous state. Marshall Eakin offers the industrialization of Belo Horizonte as an example of an extreme form of the pattern of Brazilian industrialization - a variation of capitalism characterized by state intervention, clientelism, family networks, and the lack of tehcnological innovation. At the core of the analysis are the webs of power formed by politicians, technocrats, and entrepreneurs who drove forward the process of industrialization. The first comprehensive analysis of Belo Horizonte, this book explores industrialization in Latin America, and looks beneath the larger, national economy to dissect a city and region.

Lewis and Able examine the economic relationship between Latin America and the 'advanced' countries since their independence from Spanish and Portuguese rule. They reinterpret the significance of Latin America's external connections through juxtaposing Latin America and the British scholars from different ideological and intellectual backgrounds. This work is of considerable importance in promoting comparative work in development studies of Latin America and the Third World.

Modernity tends to be considered a mostly Western, chronologically recent concept. Looking at locations in Brazil, Java, India, Georgia, and Yugoslavia, among others, Across Space and Time provides architectural and cultural evidence that modernity has had an impact across the globe and for much longer than previously conceived. This volume moves through space and time to illustrate the way global modernity has been negotiated through architecture, urban planning, design pedagogies, preservation, and art history in diverse locations around the world. Bringing together emerging and established architecture and art history scholars, each chapter focuses on a particular site where modernity was defined, challenged, or reinterpreted. The contributors examine how architectures, landscapes, and design thinking influence and are influenced by conflicts between cultural, economic, technological, and political forces. By invoking well-researched histories to ground their work in a post-colonial critique, they closely examine many prevailing myths of modernity. Notable topics include emerging architectural history in the Indian subcontinent and the connection between climate change and architecture. Ultimately, Across Space and Time contributes to the ongoing critique of architecture and its history, both as a discipline and within the academy. The authors insist that architecture is more than a style. It is a powerful expression of representational power that reveals how a society negotiates its progress.

'Mining and the State' examines the fundamental economic institutional structure of Brazil through the prism of its mineral endowment.

Marshall Eakin presents what may be the most detailed study ever written about the operations of a foreign business in Latin America and the first scholarly, book-length study of any foreign business enterprise in Brazil. Between 1830 and 1970 the British-owned St. John d’el Rey Mining Company, Ltd. constructed a diverse business conglomerate around Minas Gerais, South America’s largest gold mine, in Nova Lima. Until the 1950s the company was the largest industrial firm and the largest taxpayer in Brazil’s most populous state. Utilizing company and local archives, Eakin shows that the company was surprisingly ineffective in translating economic success into political influence in Brazil. The most impressive impact of the British operation was at the local level, transforming a small, agrarian community into a sizable industrial city. Virtually a company town, Nova Lima experienced a small-scale industrial revolution as the community made the transition from the largest industrial slave complex in Brazil to a working-class city torn by labor strife and violence between communists and their opponents.

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.” This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development. Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society. Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.

Brazil's Steel City presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, Dinius shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. Dinius argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil advances a distinctive interpretation of the dynamism of the São Paulo region since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Large and entrepreneurial coffee landlords opened the frontier to the west of the state capital, playing a key role in making the state and Brazil the world's largest coffee producer for international markets. However, many of the immigrant settlers from Italy, Japan, Spain, and other countries emerged as major actors in the last phase of frontier expansion in western São Paulo. A substantial number of them found ways to become independent agriculturalists or enact new careers in commerce, industry, and services in the network of towns emerging in this region. This volume pays close attention to the political and economic implications of this region's process of segmentation and transformation, including their links to regionalism, political conflict, and the Revolution of 1930.