Colonization as Exploitation in the Amazon Rain Forest, 1758-1911 (review)

Colonization as Exploitation in the Amazon Rain Forest, 1758-1911. By ROBIN L. ANDERSON. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 197 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

Latin Americanists frequently select research projects that have policy implications and historians often remind readers that, "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." Robin L. Anderson has done both in this careful study of various colonization schemes in Pará in the Lower Amazon Valley. The author demonstrates convincingly that the relative success of colonization hinges on the efforts of the settlers themselves and not on the grandiose and distant schemes of governors, legislators, and planners. Moreover, Anderson's careful review of colonization efforts during the Directorate (1758-98) and the myriad projects from 1850 to 1911 illustrate why past and present top-down megaprojects to exploit the people and environment of Lower Amazonia have failed.

Anderson's findings resonate with earlier works on colonization and Amazonia penned by Stephen Bunker, Marianne Schmink, David Cleary, Emilio Moran, Susanna Hecht, Nigel Smith, and others. Chronologically, this book is different from John Hemming's Red Gold, or the books on the Amazon rubber boom by Barbara Weinstein and Warren Dean, in that the author charts the course of developmentalist and statist policies from the late colonial through the middle national period. However, the first half of the nineteenth century (1798-1850), the presumed era of salutary neglect of Amazonia by exploitive outsiders, remains a mystery in this volume.

Primary sources collected at the Biblioteca Pública do Pará, the Biblioteca Nacional, Arquivo Nacional, and the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasilero supply the documentary base and carry much of the narrative through the book's six chapters. The letters, plans, and reports cited often supply surprises while they also reinforce findings published in secondary sources over the last 20 years on Brazilian, environmental, and tropical history. However, the reliance on primary sources does present its problems; sometimes "seeing the forest for the trees" becomes more difficult when the details and the authority of documents cloud the larger interpretative vision. In some cases, dueling documents and resulting statements contradict one another as on the question of indigenous mortality rates from smallpox (pp. 36, 47). The author's writing is clear and free of jargon but the internal contradictions of fact, the book's organization, and the occasional repetition of material sometimes left this reader puzzled about the direction of the argument.

The author's methodology is sophisticated and sound. Anderson collected impressive amounts of economic and demographic data, organized it, and crunched it with the aid of various computer programs. She explains her methodology and analysis in appendix B, the only section of the book where the "quantitatively challenged" will run for cover. The author's fieldwork and familiarity with the people and environment of Pará, especially in the Zona Bragantina, reinforces her analyses of colonization efforts there. She has a good sense of the struggles Northeasterners faced in and around the "pesthole" Belem and of why various efforts to import Europeans failed. But the lives and cultures of indigenous peoples are left in the background; greater reliance on anthropological sources about the Kayapó and Mundurucú, for example, would have brought the human element of this history into sharper relief.

Anderson saves the best for last. Her conclusion is clear, hard-hitting, and convincing. Her epilogue places recent Brazilian and international megaprojects in the context of the history she has written, presenting arguments and findings that will cheer environmentalists and democrats, embarrass World Bank officials, and trouble Brazilian planners who dream of colonizing and exploiting Amazonian environments and peoples.

MICHAEL EDWARD STANFIELD, University of San Francisco

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