The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil
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.
"1116829518"
The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil
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.
22.49 In Stock
The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

by Thomas D. Rogers
The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

by Thomas D. Rogers

eBook

$22.49  $29.99 Save 25% Current price is $22.49, Original price is $29.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807899588
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 11/01/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Thomas D. Rogers is assistant professor of history at Emory University.
Thomas D. Rogers is assistant professor of Africana studies and Latin American studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations xv

Introduction: The Wounds of a People and a Landscape: Labor and Agro-Environmental History 1

Part I The Landscape of the Zona Da Mata to the 1930s

1 An Eternal Verdure: The Longue Durée of the Zona da Mata 21

2 A Laboring Landscape: The Environmental Discourse of the Northeast's Sugar Elite, from Nabuco to Freyre 45

3 A Landscape of Captivity: Power and the Definition of Work and Space 71

Part II Opening Up The Zona Da Mata, 1930-1963

4 Modernizing the Sugar Industry: Cane Expansion and the Path toward Rationalization 99

5 The Zona da Mata Aflame: Political Upheaval, Strikes, and Fire 125

Part III The Dictatorship Commands The Zona Da Mata, 1964-1979

6 The Only Game in Town: Workers, Planters, and the Dictatorship 157

7 An Agricultural Boom and its Unexpected Consequences 179

Conclusion: Power, Labor, and the Agro-Environment of Pernambuco's Sugarcane Fields 203

Notes 219

Bibliography 269

Index 297

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Rogers capably and vividly reconstructs the worldviews and perspectives of all the major stakeholders in the sugarcane fields of Pernambuco. This is an important, original, and thought-provoking book.—Stuart McCook, author of States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940



Tom Rogers has written an original and provocative book that integrates the labor, environmental, and political history of Northeast Brazil. By telling a story about postemancipation sugarcane production in Pernambuco, he makes a major contribution to scholarship on both sugar production and environmental history. Weaving together a wide array of sources, Rogers recasts the cane regions of twentieth-century Pernambuco as dynamic landscapes shaped by labor strikes, fires, technological change, and regional contestations for power.—John Soluri, author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews