[Access article in PDF] Book Review
Campanha Gaúcha:
A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920
National Period
Campanha Gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920. By Stephen Bell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 292 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Rarely do monographs focus on the marginality of their subject matter as energetically or productively as Stephen Bell's new study of ranching in Brazil's southern frontier zone. Portraying rural Rio Grande do Sul in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of the "peripheries within the periphery" (p. 11), Bell provides scholars with not only rich empirical data on a still understudied region of South America but also a multifaceted analysis of uneven development. Starting from a classic question in Riograndense historiography--why Rio Grande do Sul took so long to embrace innovations that had already brought greater profits and wider markets to producers farther south in the Rio de la Plata--the author traces how local conditions shaped transfers of technology and other elements of socioeconomic "modernization" within Latin America as well as between the North and South Atlantic.
Central to Bell's argument is a model of polarized modernization (derived from the work of John Friedmann), according to which economic and cultural change diffused outward from urban centers. Their more direct and immediate contact with the Atlantic economy and its agents drew cities like Buenos Aires and São Paulo more quickly into what European-oriented elites thought of as the modernizing world. While recognizing the influence of cultural factors, Bell emphasizes the impact that structural forces had on the spread of modernization. To his credit, however, Bell demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of both the diffusion and the economic, social, and political structures conditioning it. Indeed, the very thesis of his work is that complex and contingent circumstances gave Riograndense elites sound reasons to transform, rather than simply to adopt, markers of modernization.
To trace that process, he provides in the first three chapters a meticulously researched, baseline description of the physical geography, relations of production, and patterns of trade that characterized mid-nineteenth-century Rio Grande do Sul. Here the notion of polarization proves particularly apt, for it allows Bell to portray the campanha zone as caught between competing centers in the Plata and in the center-south of Brazil. The more southern of those poles, for example, gave repeated and alluring evidence of the potential profitability of innovations. Because of the domination of the Brazilian polity by Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo planters, on the other hand, the more northern pole helped limit change in Rio Grande by withholding state backing for infrastructural and other improvements by relatively marginal elites. [End Page 209]
The core of the book lies in the three chapters that describe Riograndense experiences with selective breeding, fencing, wage labor, frigoríficos (meat-chilling or freezing plants), and other innovations, and in the two final chapters, which summarize the argument and take the story past 1920. Continuing the impressive use of Brazilian and Plata regional contexts, these sections trace both the powerful impact of changing global markets on Riograndense ranching and the circumstances that mediated that influence. Especially welcome is Bell's reference not only to questions of narrowly defined efficiency and profitability of production but also to broader social and cultural issues. In discussing the late arrival of fencing and rural codes in Rio Grande do Sul, for example, Bell argues convincingly that the comparatively weak position of the state's ranching elites forced them to make concessions to outlaws and the rural poor.
While commendable for its consideration of a range of factors, the book would benefit from more precise definitions of two key terms. A single, comprehensive explanation of what he means by modernization would sharpen Bell's argument and make explicit its distance from earlier generations of development studies. Greater care in his description of cultural factors, which at times appear explicable as, and almost reducible to, socioeconomic choices but...
Campanha Gaucha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920 (review)
