The nineteenth century saw the expansion of Western influence across the globe. A consular presence in a new territory had numerous advantages for business and trade. Using specific case studies, de Goey demonstrates the key role played by consuls in the rise of the global economy.

The first complete account of the rise and fall of the rubber economy in Brazil provides a dramatic example of one of the boom and bust cycles traditionally associated with Brazilian economic history. The Amazon rubber trade was one of the most important export booms in the history of Latin America, dominating the economic life of the Amazon for 70 years until the successful cultivation of rubber trees by the British in Southeast Asia. Yet this long period of vigorous economic activity left the basic structure of Amazonian society relatively unchanged. One of the author's main concerns is to explore why rubber exports did not generate substantial growth in either the industrial or the agricultural sector, and she finds the answers primarily in the relations of production and exchange that characterized the Amazon's extractive economy. The study also considers the impact of political decentralization and regionalism on the Amazonian economy, draws comparisons with the coffee boom in Sao Paulo that induced sustained industrial growth in that area, and traces the consequences of the rubber economy's collapse on the social, political, and economic life in the Amazon.

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.

This is the first book-length study in English to examine the Cabanagem, one of Brazil's largest peasant and urban-poor insurrections.