In this Book
- The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
summary
In The Deepest Wounds, Thomas D. Rogers traces social and environmental changes over four centuries in Pernambuco, Brazil's key northeastern sugar-growing state. Focusing particularly on the period from the end of slavery in 1888 to the late twentieth century, when human impact on the environment reached critical new levels, Rogers confronts the day-to-day world of farming--the complex, fraught, and occasionally poetic business of making sugarcane grow.
Renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose home state was Pernambuco, observed, "Monoculture, slavery, and latifundia--but principally monoculture--they opened here, in the life, the landscape, and the character of our people, the deepest wounds." Inspired by Freyre's insight, Rogers tells the story of Pernambuco's wounds, describing the connections among changing agricultural technologies, landscapes and human perceptions of them, labor practices, and agricultural and economic policy. This web of interrelated factors, Rogers argues, both shaped economic progress and left extensive environmental and human damage.
Combining a study of workers with analysis of their landscape, Rogers offers new interpretations of crucial moments of labor struggle, casts new light on the role of the state in agricultural change, and illuminates a legacy that influences Brazil's development even today.
Renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose home state was Pernambuco, observed, "Monoculture, slavery, and latifundia--but principally monoculture--they opened here, in the life, the landscape, and the character of our people, the deepest wounds." Inspired by Freyre's insight, Rogers tells the story of Pernambuco's wounds, describing the connections among changing agricultural technologies, landscapes and human perceptions of them, labor practices, and agricultural and economic policy. This web of interrelated factors, Rogers argues, both shaped economic progress and left extensive environmental and human damage.
Combining a study of workers with analysis of their landscape, Rogers offers new interpretations of crucial moments of labor struggle, casts new light on the role of the state in agricultural change, and illuminates a legacy that influences Brazil's development even today.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xiv
- Abbreviations
- pp. xv-xvi
- PART I: THE LANDSCAPE OF THE ZONA DA MATA TO THE 1930S
- PART II: OPENING UP THE ZONA DA MATA, 1930–1963
- PART III: THE DICTATORSHIP COMMANDS THE ZONA DA MATA, 1964–1979
- Bibliography
- pp. 269-295
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469603902
Related ISBN(s)
9780807834336, 9780807871676, 9780807899588
MARC Record
OCLC
676697426
Pages
320
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No