Campanha Gaucha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920 (review)

Campanha Gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920. By Stephen Bell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 292 pp. $55.00

The history of Brazilian agriculture has been conspicuously neglected. Such treatment is hardly warranted now that Brazil has become one of the world's leading exporters of foodstuffs. This excellent monograph about a pastoral zone of southern Brazil (the Campanha Gaúcha), however, partially meets this scholarly need. The author wants especially to explain why a cattle-raising region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was slower to "modernize" its agriculture than the seemingly similar grasslands regions of the La Plata region (Argentina and Uruguay). The divergence becomes more puzzling given the fact that all of these areas were subjected to a similar European demand (somewhat weaker in the Campanha) for foodstuffs, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bell finds multiple causes for Rio Grande do Sul's lag. One is a failure to experience the world boom that attracted innovation-minded immigrants and produced higher incomes in La Plata. The persistence of slavery in the Campanha into the 1880s was a further deterrent to immigration. Also significant was the relative weakness of its infrastructure, especially port facilities. The ranchers themselves were a hindrance, "more given to satisfying than to optimizing" (205). For once, however, dependency is not the explanation. Bell finds that the domestic mercantile elite was not working hand-in-glove with the foreign-born merchants. The slow growth of this Brazilian region cannot be attributed, as can much of the change of the Plata, to the baneful influences of British capital and its representatives.

Bell makes a plea for researchers to supplement their analysis of core-periphery economic relations by looking more carefully at the "resource transfers within the periphery" (207). As the author rightly points out, such transfers have taken on great significance in this region in view of the emergence of Mercosur, the region's highly successful common market.

Thomas E. Skidmore
Brown University

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