Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations used in the footnotes
- A note on spelling
- Brazil: physical features and state capitals
- Introduction: Contrasting Societies: Britain and Brazil
- 1 The Onset of Modernization in Brazil
- 2 Coffee and Rails
- 3 The Export–Import Complex
- 4 The Urban Style
- 5 Britain and the Industrialization of Brazil
- 6 Changing Patterns of Labor: Slave Trade and Slavery
- 7 Britain and the Entrepreneurs
- 8 Freedom and Association
- 9 Progress and Spencer
- 10 Middle-Class Britain and the Brazilian Liberals
- 11 Individual Salvation
- 12 Declining Influence
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Financial Record of the Minas and Rio Railway Company, Ltd, 1881–1902
- Appendix B Financial Record of the São Paulo Railway Company, Ltd, 1865–1920
- Appendix C Exports from Great Britain to Brazil, 1850–1909
- List of Sources
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations used in the footnotes
- A note on spelling
- Brazil: physical features and state capitals
- Introduction: Contrasting Societies: Britain and Brazil
- 1 The Onset of Modernization in Brazil
- 2 Coffee and Rails
- 3 The Export–Import Complex
- 4 The Urban Style
- 5 Britain and the Industrialization of Brazil
- 6 Changing Patterns of Labor: Slave Trade and Slavery
- 7 Britain and the Entrepreneurs
- 8 Freedom and Association
- 9 Progress and Spencer
- 10 Middle-Class Britain and the Brazilian Liberals
- 11 Individual Salvation
- 12 Declining Influence
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Financial Record of the Minas and Rio Railway Company, Ltd, 1881–1902
- Appendix B Financial Record of the São Paulo Railway Company, Ltd, 1865–1920
- Appendix C Exports from Great Britain to Brazil, 1850–1909
- List of Sources
- Index
Summary
In Brazil cities were the beachheads of the modern world. Urban groups wished to approximate the models created in Europe in their economic organization, social structure, attitudes, and style of life. Brazilians must now eat imported foods, cure their sickness with patent medicines, perfume themselves with new scents, fill their homes with strange furniture and novel sanitary devices, light their houses without oil, go into town with greater speed and return to garden suburbs, dress in the foreign mode, and adopt new forms of recreation, all because Europeans were doing it. And even when Paris was the ideal, it was the British who supplied the wherewithal to imitate it. Aspiring to enter the ranks of modernity, the Brazilian urban classes proudly adopted a new way of life as if holding up a coat of arms largely designed by the British and emblazoned with British devices.
One of the most striking aspects of the Brazilian import structure was the degree to which these urban groups, formed by the beginning processes of modernization, demanded in their cities the products that were available overseas. Few things are more intimately a part of one's culture than one's diet; yet urban, mobile Brazilians were led by their fascination with modernity to use imported foodstuffs. British foods were a common item on the shelves of the nineteenth-century merchant in Rio de Janeiro. At first, dairy products headed the list. One importer received 500 barrels of butter from England during one month in 1850, and English butter continued to be advertised in the Rio de Janeiro papers until the 1870s.
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- Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil 1850–1914 , pp. 112 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1968
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