Synopses & Reviews
Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come.
Review
andquot;In equal measure environmental, economic, and diplomatic history, Seth Garfield's In Search of the Amazon is much more than the sum of its parts. With clear prose and sharp analysis, Garfield's wonderful new book is a model for how to write the social history of nature, placing the great, wondrous Amazon at the heart of America's transnational twentieth century.andquot;andmdash;Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Review
andquot;In this path-breaking study, Seth Garfield explores one of the most significant U.S. interventions in Amazonia. During World War II, the United States was desperate for rubber after losing access to Asian markets. In alliance with Brazil, the U.S. government embarked on an aggressive initiative to jump-start the Amazon rubber trade. Garfield masterfully recasts U.S.-Amazonian relations, revealing the wartime roots of the ideological and bureaucratic structures that have shaped modern Amazonia.andquot;andmdash;Susanna B. Hecht, author of The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha
Review
andquot;Seth Garfield's extraordinary book reflects an enormous amount of research, knowledge, and thought about the Amazon. Besides recounting a fascinating chapter of World War II, Garfield places the history of the Amazon within a grid of political, social, and economic concerns that transcend the region's borders but are ultimately modulated by its particular circumstances of settlement and exploitation. He demonstrates the importance of wartime events in shaping subsequent disputes over the fate of the rain forest.andquot;andmdash;Barbara Weinstein, author of The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850andndash;1920
Review
andldquo;Weaving together social, economic, and environmental history, Seth Garfield shows how in the twentieth century the Amazon region become the locus of contention for a variety of actors, including Brazilian state official, international capitalists, drought refugees, and migrant laborers. andhellip;This book is recommended for use in graduate course in the history of US-Latin American Relations, labor history, and environmental studies.andrdquo;
Review
andquot;[Garfield] succeeds best as a straightforward storyteller in the best tradition of talented historians.andquot;
Review
andquot;Garfield is to be commended for shedding so much light on the cultural and eonomic history of the Amazon in the twentieth century. This book is a must have for all those interested in development policy in the Amazon.andquot;
Review
andldquo;I highly recommend this book for its systematic and nuanced treatment of a region in flux. Garfield traces important precursors of contemporary inter-regional migration, land conflict, environmental change, and regional development policies. Amazon specialists will enjoy the meticulous archival work, and geographers will appreciate the focus on environmental history and political ecology. Those with general Latin American interests will learn about an important but often overlooked chapter in regional change.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;This thoughtful, well-rounded book is, then, an invaluable addition to the English language historiography of the Amazon that remedies a gap in the extant literature. It also foregrounds an aspect of the war effort far from the battlefields that made an important, if largely unacknowledged, contribution to Allied victory for which participating Brazilian rubbers tappers could retrospectively be proud.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Garfield makes an important contribution to Brazilian historiographyandhellip;. [He] combines thorough research in US and Brazilian government documents and contemporary publications with discerning use of labor and criminal court cases and oral histories with rubber migrants.andrdquo;
Synopsis
This history of the international, national, and local conflicts surrounding the extraction of resources from the Amazon during the Second World War shows how those conflicts shaped contemporary ideas about the rainforest.
About the Author
Seth Garfield is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937andndash;1988, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acronyms ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. The Reappearing Amazon 1
1. Border and Progress: The Amazon and the Estado Novo 9
2. andquot;The Quicksands of Untrustworthy Supplyandquot;: U.S. Rubber Dependency and the Lure of the Amazon 49
3. Rubber's andquot;Soldiersandquot;: Reinventing the Amazonian Worker 86
4. The Environment of Northeastern Migration to the Amazon: Landscapes, Labor, and Love 127
5. War in the Amazon: Struggles over Resources and Images 170
Epilogue. From Wartime Soldiers to Green Guerrillas 213
Notes 229
Bibliography 303
Index 333