The publication of the volume edited by Ricardo Bielschowsky, Mauro Boianovsky, and Maurício Chalfin Coutinho is certainly worthy of praise. It is the first volume in English to cover the history of Brazilian economic thought from the early sixteenth century to the 2010s. The three editors are renowned experts in the field. Moreover, the timing of the publication of this book seems quite appropriate. For those who follow this academic field in Brazil, the last two decades have clearly shown an increase in the number of specialists, research groups, and works on the subject. The chapters in this volume take advantage of this literature published in recent decades.
The book is divided into four parts. While the first part is thematic, the other three parts follow a chronological organization. The first part contains only one chapter, written by Mauro Boianovsky, and deals with the original contributions to economic theory by Brazilian economists. The second part covers the colonial period and the first years of independence (after 1822). The third part is named after the commodity that largely determined the course of the Brazilian economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is entitled “The Coffee Era” and consists of three chapters. The last part is comprised of two chapters that divide the twentieth century into the “era of development” (1930 to 1980) and the “era of globalization” (1981 to 2010).
In analyzing Brazilian original contributions to economic theory, Boianovsky deals almost exclusively with the period after the mid-twentieth century. In our view, three episodes in this narrative are particularly interesting. First was the transformation of the Brazilian economics into a more sophisticated system of teaching and research, a change that took place through foreign patronage. From the late 1960s onwards, foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and USAID funded the establishment of graduate programs and the creation of the Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics. The second episode of interest is the emergence of theories on inertial inflation, certainly a by-product of the huge inflationary problem faced by Brazil in the period. In practical terms, they culminate in the elaboration and implementation of the Real Plan in 1994 by researchers who worked at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Interestingly, Boianovsky notes that little of what was developed on inertial inflation ended up being published abroad. Finally, it is worth noting something that is not exactly an episode in history but a characteristic of Brazilian academia in economics. In Brazil, the academia in economics can be described as a plural community, in which heterodox theories are advocated by important researchers and taught in many reputable institutions.
On the colonial economy, José Luís Cardoso notes that the thinking of this period was mainly about practical colonial problems. The main issues were the exploitation of slave labor and natural resources. The two main characters in these chapters are politicians and public administrators from the eighteenth century. The importance of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699–1782), the Marquis of Pombal, cannot be overestimated in terms of the history of Portugal and Brazil. Pombal effectively ruled the Portuguese Empire between 1750 and 1777. Some of Pombal’s ideas can be traced back to German cameralism. The other important figure in this chapter is Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho (1755–1812), an important public administrator and Pombal’s godson.
The next chapter deals with the post-colonial period (after 1808). There are two main figures in the chapter written by Maurício Coutinho. José da Silva Lisboa (1756–1835), the Viscount of Cairu, was the main disseminator of political economy knowledge in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Cairu was an enthusiast of Adam Smith —as was Coutinho—and in 1804 published a treatise in Portuguese entitled Princípios de Economia Política (Principles of political economy). Another member of Coutinho’s circle and an admirer of Smith was José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva. The importance of Bonifácio, like that of Pombal, is difficult to exaggerate. Born in Brazil but with a long career as a professor of geology in Europe, he was the main articulator of Brazilian independence in 1822. Under the influence of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which was dominant at the University of Coimbra from the late 1770s, and Masonic philosophy, Bonifácio was a courageous advocate of the abolition of slavery.
The third part of the book deals with three major issues that dominated discussions during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, as Amaury Patrick Gremaud and Renato Leite Marcondes, authors of the chapter on slavery, point out, this was the most debated issue of the time. Perhaps the fact that this heinous institution continued to exist until almost the end of the nineteenth century explains why the subject had been so debated. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. During this period, a number of different arguments were put forward in favor of maintaining or abolishing this inhuman institution. Among the arguments were economic ones. Both older abolitionists, such as Bonifácio and João Severiano Maciel da Costa (1769–1833), and figures from the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) and André Rebouças (1838–1898), relied on the ideas of European economists in their arguments. The mulatto Rebouças, for example, placed the idea of individual freedom at the center of his arguments, influenced by writers such as Smith, Stuart Mill, François Quesnay, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and Jean-Baptiste Say.
The other two chapters of the third part are on monetary debates and industrialization, respectively. Regarding the monetary debates, André Villela gives a good summary of the controversy that was central between 1850 and 1930. The debate took place between the so-called papelistas and metalistas, roughly equivalent to the Banking and Currency schools in England, correspondingly. Although the metalist position was dominant in the period, among the papelistas were figures of paramount importance to Brazilian history, such as Irineu Evangelista de Souza (1813–1889), the Viscount of Mauá, and Rui Barbosa (1849–1923). Moreover, Villela notes that the debaters of this subject in Brazil were individuals who were attuned to the latest developments on the subject overseas. As for industrialization and protectionism, Flávio Versiani makes a point of showing the richness of a debate that cannot be taken simply as biased towards free trade. He shows how politicians with important positions such as Manoel Alves Branco (1797–1855) and Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres (1802–1872) were in favor of protectionism. Moreover, after 1870, it is possible to identify a proto-developmentalism in figures such as Amaro Cavalcanti (1849–1922) and Inocêncio Sezerdello Correia (1858–1932).
The last two chapters cover the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. There is some overlap with the chapter written by Boianovsky, but also much worthwhile material. The chapter by Ricardo Bielschowsky and Carlos Mussi on the developmentalist era is very much based on the first author’s classic, first published in the 1980s, entitled Brazilian Economic Thought: The Ideological Cycle of Developmentalism (Bielschowsky [1985] Reference Bielschowsky2022). This book is certainly one of the best and most informative works on Brazilian economic thought. The categorization of economists and their ideas into developmentalist, socialist, and liberal schools drives the narrative and shows the richness of thought of the period. In this chapter, the authors also address the decline of developmentalist thought and its replacement by the dominance of a more neoliberal economics. In the final chapter, Eduardo Bastian and Carlos Bastos face the challenge of documenting a history in the making. The highlights of this chapter are the careful treatment of the debate and implementation of complex anti-inflationary policies and the transition from the neoliberal model of the 1990s to the social-liberal one of the first two terms of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. The chapter concludes with a characterization, which I believe is quite accurate, of the current debate among the three competing strands of economic thought in Brazil: the liberals, the social developmentalists, and the new developmentalists.
As a researcher in this field, I must note the difficulties of studying the history of economic thought in peripheral countries such as Brazil. In my view, the lack of documentation and well-organized archives is a challenging obstacle to overcome. In addition, there is the lack of funding for research on this kind of topic. However, this volume is a well-executed illustration of the richness and interest of the history of Brazilian economic thought. Therefore, I hope that research on peripheral countries like Brazil might constitute a new frontier for historians of economic thought, not only in places like Latin America, but worldwide.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The author declares no competing interests exist.
