Overview

A massive urban renewal and public-health campaign in the first decades of the nineteenth century transformed Brazil's capital into a showcase of European architecture and public works. The renovation of Rio, or civilization campaign, as the government called it, widened streets, modernized the port, and improved sanitation, lighting, and public transportation. These changes made life worse, not better, for the majority of the city's residents, however; the laboring poor could no longer afford to live in the downtown, and the public-health plan did not extend to the peripheral areas where they were being forced to move. Their resistance is the focus of Teresa Meade's study. Meade details how Rio grew according to the requirements of international capital, which financed, planned, and oversaw the renewal-and how local movements resisted these powerful, distant forces. She also traces the popular rebellion that continued for more than twenty years after the renovation ended in 1909, illustrating that community protests are the major characteristic of political life in the modern era. Teresa A. Meade is Associate Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She is co-editor, with Mark Walker, of Science, Medicine, and Cultural Imperialism (St. Martin's, 1991).

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Reviews

Using an impressive array of Brazilian primary and secondary sources and placing her study within a larger theoretical context on the causes of urban violence, Meade shows that Rio's development, like that of many metropolises in the developing world . . . was planned. . . . An excellent resource for those interested in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro during the Old Republic, and urban violence in general. --W. M. Weis, Choice

['Civilizing' Rio] is part of the new social history that emphasizes crowds, popular resistance, and neighborhoods in the context of social classes. The study supplies concrete historical data to test world systems theories of how popular movements were affected by the effect of world economic change and contributes an original argument in the areas of urban and labor history. There is much comparative discussion placing the study in the international context of other third world areas such as Africa, Argentina, Mexico, as well as Western Europe. --Timothy F. Harding, California State University, Los Angeles

Author Information

Teresa A. Meade is Associate Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She is co-editor, with Mark Walker, of Science, Medicine, and Cultural Imperialism (1991).

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