Book review: Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution - by Timothy Lorek

 A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm.

Lorek on Rogers, 'Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution'

Rogers, Thomas D..  Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Illustrations, maps. 306 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781469670447.$29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781469670454.$22.99 (e-book), ISBN 9781469670461. 

Reviewed by Timothy Lorek (College of St. Scholastica)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60115

One of the most intriguing aspects of the recent boom in historical studies of the mid-twentieth-century process remembered as the Green Revolution is the new light cast on the emergence of crops destined not for human food consumption but for industrial purposes, fuel, and animal feed. As Thomas D. Rogers adroitly demonstrates in Agriculture’s Energy, a case study of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol production, investments in agriculture too often lead to food insecurity. Whether Brazilian sugarcane, Iowa corn, Argentine soybeans, or Indonesian oil palm, the consolidation of agribusiness through machinery, fertilizer, and pesticide markets, not to mention state subsidies and development plans, has contributed to a wide range of social challenges, for example, increased land concentration, urbanization, malnutrition, and water pollution. While anthropologists, development economists, and historians focused on the United States and Europe have long recognized the Green Revolution’s complex and intensely debated results, the recent scholarly ascendance of historians focused on new archives and actors in what was once known as the Third World has produced an array of studies that carefully unpack the Green Revolution’s impact in more localized contexts. The growing spotlight on these place-specific impacts significantly includes the ways state planning, international science, and Cold War development benefited incipient industries like Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol sector.

Agriculture’s Energy is not the only recent monograph to tackle Brazil’s ethanol industry, including the state program advanced during the military dictatorship known as Proálcool (National Alcohol Program, 1975-90). Rogers’s study is in good company with another prominent English-language text, Jennifer Eaglin’s excellent Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, also published in 2022. Where Eaglin focuses on specific conditions in Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo) and emphasizes the broader context of energy transitions, Rogers highlights international development and the above described irony linking intensified agricultural production and hunger. Rogers also provides a broad national focus to Brazil’s ethanol history, including a sustained and intriguing geographic comparison between the country’s Northeast and Center-South.

Agriculture’s Energy is divided into two parts. In part 1, “Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization,” Rogers examines the policy and development contexts of ethanol production in historical sequence. Chapter 1 begins in 1918 when the country’s largest sugar mill owner publicly advocated for federal government support for agricultural research and production. Two competing assumptions lay behind this and other calls for government support. First, Brazilian agriculture was seen by many as backward and in need of modernization. Second, Brazilian agriculture, despite its backwardness, was critical to the country’s identity and future prosperity. Rogers goes on to tell the story of Brazilian agricultural modernization vis-à-vis sugarcane through the careers of northeastern sugarcane producer and politician Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho and center-southern agronomist Ruy Miller Paiva. Juxtaposing the impact of Barbosa Lima and Paiva emphasizes the regional rivalry between the Northeast and São Paulo, as the latter shifted from a dependence on coffee to a research-oriented resurgence of sugarcane. It also highlights the centralization of Brazilian domestic politics during the Getúlio Vargas era, seen through the emphasis on national planning for agricultural production, as well as the emerging embrace of international development funding and expertise.

The next two chapters unpack the contexts of sugarcane ethanol production in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 places ethanol against the backdrop of the global Green Revolution in agricultural technologies. In this context, the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (Sugar and Alcohol Institute, IAA) released a new long-range growth plan that increased production and spurred the establishment of dozens of new sugarcane mills. São Paulo producers likewise established new research centers and dramatically expanded their use of fertilizer. Meanwhile, the federal government harnessed international aid to pump into higher education programs such as development economics. By the 1970s, the Green Revolution’s broad impact led to increased industrialization and the ascendency of an agricultural product destined for industrial rather than food usage.

Chapter 3 then examines policy debates swirling around Proálcool. The unequal development of the country during the “Brazilian Miracle” was reflected in Proálcool, a program dominated by energy and industry representatives rather than agriculturalists and one that contributed to the specific growth of private companies and large producers, especially in São Paulo (more than 60 percent of national production in 1980), who partnered with the federal government. The program was canceled amid corruption scandals and a shift from state-led growth models to privatization and neoliberal deregulation. As Rogers concludes, Proálcool should not be evaluated as primarily an agricultural or energy policy, nor as a bailout to the sugarcane industry. Instead, it was a development program. “Proálcool’s establishment was one episode in the consolidation of a mode of development that crystallized out of the domestic and international programs that had supported and nurtured agricultural transformation over the preceding decades. Development in this guise had produced the linked processes we know as agribusiness” (p. 108).

Part 2, “Proálcool’s Consequences,” includes three chapters that examine labor, environmental issues, and the gross inequality that “directed agriculture’s prodigious energy into the transportation system rather than the food system” (p. 170). As in his first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (2010), Rogers excels at weaving analyses of labor relations, class, and environmental conditions. In these sections, Rogers offers rich details about physical work, pollution, and policy debates, as well as thoughtful conclusions about symbolic representation and relationships. Chapter 4 focuses on the mobility of a new type of industrial worker: poor, vulnerable, urban, and increasingly female sugarcane workers often precariously employed via third-party labor contracts (the “flexibilization of the labor force” [p. 120]). Union mobilization on behalf of these bóia-fria workers (the derogatory term “cold lunch”) in the 1980s contested their marginality and cheapness.

Similarly, in chapter 5, Rogers examines another challenge to Proálcool: growing concern about the program’s environmental record. Enormous quantities of waste were produced, particularly a byproduct of the ethanol industry often termed vinhaça or vinhoto. As waste lagoons that held this sludge became increasingly common with growing sugarcane ethanol production under Proálcool, public debate over the environmental issue proliferated in the 1970s. As with union mobilization on behalf of workers, public pressure and scientific alarm forced the hand of the Brazilian government to enact broad environmental legislation in the early 1980s.

Finally, chapter 6 examines how Proálcool reflected an industrial development model that exacerbated inequality by providing incentives to shift significant land and labor toward the production of ethanol rather than food. Research produced growing evidence in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Brazil’s policies led to significant increases in industrial and export crop production at the expense of food production, which actually dropped more than 25 percent per capita between 1976 and 1980 (p. 189). All of this points to some overarching conclusions evaluated in the epilogue: for example, “what is agriculture for?” (p. 199). Rogers suggests that the development model embodied by Proálcool advanced the cause of private sector industrial growth by shifting rural populations toward precarious wage work made possible by cheap energy and cheap food, both of which were produced at considerable cost to the environment. Rogers’s analysis of the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol boom thus helps reveal the consolidation of a particular agribusiness model that depends on, even naturalizes, inequality. Seen this way, the history of Proálcool is instructive as we contend with a new era of agribusiness-led growth models and carbon markets.

Agriculture’s Energy is an important addition to a growing scholarly literature on late twentieth-century industrial agriculture. Rogers’s use of labor journals, newspaper editorials, and court documents in part 2 makes an invaluable contribution to Green Revolution scholarship and Brazilian studies. Beyond the Green Revolution and Brazil, scholars investigating energy histories, public-private partnerships, and the roots of twenty-first-century climate change debates and proposed policies will find the book helpful for its details as well the author’s ability to weave multiple themes.

Citation: Timothy Lorek. Review of Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60115

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Atkinson on Rollo, 'Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire' [Review] (H-Net Reviews)

Estamos vivenciando o fim de uma era? O fim da expansão contínua do império americano e o início da re-ascensão do Império do Meio (em sua fase política comunista), depois de dois séculos e meio de ascensão do primeiro e do declínio do segundo? 

Pode ser, mas é um processo que pode se passar pacificamente, ou envolver algum conflito bilateral, uma vez que se trata de um processo diferente do que houve durante a era anterior, quando os dois impérios estavam relativamente ou absolutamente desconectados. Desta vez, há uma grande interdependência (já foi melhor) e intensos contatos entre os dois impérios, diretamente e nas zonas de fricção (Taiwan e Rússia, para mencionar apenas duas), o que pode comandar uma convivência em bons termos ou atiçar conflitos já existentes. Este livro trata do passado e não do presente ou do futuro, mas ele oferece boas indicações sobre como abordar essa MAIS IMPORTANTE relação da atual geopolítica mundial, mais até do que o desafio da Rússia, que pode ser contido no continente europeu.

As próximas décadas já são a de uma nova corrida armamentista, nuclear e espacial, e de uma disputa de arrogâncias que pode descambar para um conflito direto. O que significa que não haverá muito espaço para a cooperação conjunta em benefício dos países mais pobres, mas uma competição sem qualquer convergência de objetivos entre os dois grandes impérios da atualidade.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 19/05/2024

Atkinson on Rollo, 'Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Rollo, Stuart.  Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 296 pp. $55.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421447384.

Reviewed by David C. Atkinson (Purdue University)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60309

Stuart Rollo’s Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire is a richly kaleidoscopic contribution to the ever-burgeoning literature on US-China relations. Rollo situates the Sino-US relationship in terms of the rise and fall of American empire, and this is the book’s most important interpretive contribution. Focusing on the context and character of Americans’ evolving disposition toward China over the last 250 years, he begins with an overview of US continental colonization and Americans’ subsequent expansion into the Pacific Ocean. He concludes with President Joseph Biden’s attempt to resuscitate the diminished structures of the US-dominated liberal internationalist order. In between, Rollo entwines his evaluation of American engagements with China with an expertly rendered narrative of imperialism and foreign relations, blending historical and international relations perspectives throughout. It is an erudite and informative synthesis that should appeal to all H-Diplo readers, as well as our students and members of the public who seek a clear understanding of why contemporary US-Chinese relations remain so fraught in our present moment, and how we got here.

Terminus is a versatile book that can be read in multiple registers. Rollo’s narrative is especially valuable for the way he weaves four distinct narrative threads together. On one level, it is a useful survey of Sino-US relations, albeit one that emphasizes the perspectives of American rather than Chinese interlocuters in that relationship. Readers looking for the Chinese perspective, or a greater focus on traditional diplomatic relations, will find it lacking compared to Warren I. Cohen’s still essential America’s Response to China (2019), for example. But that is not Rollo’s purpose. Rather, Terminus seeks to integrate that story into the history of American empire and expansion. On that level, it offers something particularly novel. Historians of American imperialism might balk at Rollo’s emphasis on the imperial rather than colonial manifestations of Americans’ desire for economic, if not territorial, suzerainty in Aisa, but again, that is not his objective: how Americans conceived of China (Qing, Nationalist, and Communist) in relation to the rise and fall of American empire (commercial, financial, territorial, military, and ideational) is the focus. In addition to interlacing these themes, on another level Rollo pays regular attention to the ideas of those theorists and strategists who whetted American appetites when it came to China, combining historical and international relations scholarship and perspectives throughout the narrative. We hear from a large cast of both critics and boosters of American power from across the centuries, including Karl Marx, John Atkinson Hobson, Nicholas Spykman, William Appleman Williams, and Andrew Bacevich to name a few. Finally, the book can be read as a very engaging survey of US foreign relations writ large, since Rollo never confines himself to the transpacific lens, and instead constantly keeps American visions of China in the same frame as Americans’ conceptions of a broader global imperium.

Terminus is therefore best understood as an alloy, in that it derives its strength from the mixture of these four interlacing narratives and frames. The result is a concise and accessible book that offers an adept historical overview of China’s changing significance to American policymakers, theorists, and strategists from independence to the present.

The book is divided into three sections, each encompassing a distinct phase of American ambitions for China. Part 1 traces the story from the aftermath of independence to the turn of the twentieth century and focuses on the commercial and financial aspirations of American merchants, statesmen, and strategists during that century. In the first two chapters, Rollo roots his narrative in a familiar story of westward expansion characterized by violent Native dispossession and the insatiable drive for land and commercial access to Asia. In that context, China especially enraptured those seeking to exploit Asia’s potentially lucrative markets, goods, and raw materials. Rollo is attentive to the domestic and international contexts that both facilitated and inhibited the realization of these prospects—whether real or imagined—and he emphasizes the internal and external ruptures that catalyzed the Qing dynasty’s nineteenth-century decline. This part of the book culminates in the convulsion of late nineteenth-century US imperialism, and Rollo rightly focuses on the major manifestations of that paroxysm in the Asia-Pacific region. The Open-Door Notes and the Boxer Rebellion receive particular attention, and Rollo is attentive to the racial and geostrategic anxieties that suffused the most capacious cravings of those who viewed China as an outlet not only for American goods, but also American capital and civilization.

Part 2 addresses the twentieth-century phase of US economic and strategic predominance, from the emergence of American power following the First World War to the ostensive triumph of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Rollo unsurprisingly foregrounds the American and Japanese competition for East Asian predominance at the core of this section’s first chapter, orienting his analysis productively toward modern industrial warfare’s thirst for strategic raw materials. From this perspective, both contenders perceived China as a repository of essential minerals like manganese and tungsten that would consolidate their prospective regional—and in the case of the United States, global—primacy. Chapter 5 broadens its frame commensurate with the now truly global aspirations of American power. The allure of potential markets and investment opportunities in China and elsewhere now gave way to more sophisticated geostrategic conceptions of global capitalist integration and cooperation. Commercial dominance remained an important objective, but security and prosperity now required the creation and management of an intricate, internationally panoptic liberal-democratic architecture, one dominated of course by the United States. In Asia, that manifested in what Rollo provocatively calls an “American-led Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” anchored by Japan (pp. 120-121).

The sixth chapter addresses the emergence of the People’s Republic and the Cold War, which in Rollo’s interpretation sees China evoke a more dangerously existential threat to the broader hegemonic project fostered by the United States, not just in Asia but around the world. He sees the wars in Korea and Vietnam as exemplars of that project, but also harbingers of its demise. It is the one chapter in which Rollo’s argument might have benefited from more room to breathe, since we are hurled at breakneck speed through some of the most consequential moments in the history of Sino-US relations. This includes not only those devasting American wars in Southeast and East Asia, but also President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement, President Jimmy Carter’s fulfillment of recognition, and the profound economic transformations of the Ronald Reagan years, not to mention those of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

The third part of Terminus transitions to the post-Cold War era through the present. Here, Rollo recounts the flush of victory that encouraged American policymakers to confidently thrust the open door upon the globe. The desire to secure markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities reigned supreme, as successive US presidents and their counselors inside and outside government tried to reshape the world in America’s apparently transcendent image. For Rollo, economic access and predominance remained paramount, but contemporary presidents differed in their enthusiasm for strategic competition with China. It waned during the Bill Clinton years, during which American officials believed the gospel of globalization would convert Chinese Communist leaders to the benefits of democratization and neoliberal economics. Strategic competition nevertheless waxed under the presidency of George W. Bush, exacerbated by the events of September 11 and the global war on terror. American imperial overreach during the Bush years diminished the United States’ capacity to reshape the world in its image, and China seized the opportunity to reorient and strengthen its own economy, eventually supplanting the US as the global economic hegemon by many metrics.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with American attempts to alternatively understand, manage, resist, or reset that reality. The final chapter is, from my perspective, the most generative and thought-provoking. Rollo proves as fluent in the lexicon of modern security studies as he is with its historical antecedents. His assessment of our contemporary options to grapple with the threat and possibilities posed by Xi Jinping’s resurgent China is clear-eyed and judicious. Rollo’s estimation of the most productive path forward reflects that most venerable analogy, favored by generations of American national security personnel: the Goldilocks principle. While President Donald Trump favored a white-hot porridge laced with quid pro quos, zero-sum transactions, and military superiority, others have mooted the cold gruel of retrenchment. Rollo not surprisingly favors the more palatable oats of “offshore balancing and mutual deterrence and denial” (p. 206). That might not set the taste buds alight, but it is much less likely to cause irreparable indigestion.

The final chapter concludes with one of the book’s most intriguing points. Here, Rollo posits our contemporary conundrum: how to ensure peace between “a rising Chinese empire and a declining American one” (p. 208). This brief recognition that China is erecting an imperial structure of its own—one that reflects its own interests and yet echoes many elements of the now deteriorating edifice constructed by the United States—is a tantalizing gesture toward the next century of US-Chinese relations. It also demands that we retrain our focus less on American intentions and possible rear-guard actions, and more on the objectives of China’s ruling class as it looks toward the next century. Others are already doing that work, of course, and Rollo’s Terminus will be a very useful text for them as they come to grips with the American half of that equation.[1] The nightly gaggle of pundits who confidently espouse the unique dangers of China’s rise would do particularly well to take cognizance of Rollo’s historicization of the United States’ attitudes toward global power across the last two centuries. They may find more resonances than dissonances between the waning American imperium they lament, and the expanding Chinese imperium they decry.

Note

[1]. See. for example, Suisheng Zhao, The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022); Susan L. Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Bates Gill, Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Ambitions under Xi Jinping (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

David C. Atkinson is associate professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Labor Migration in the British Empire and the United States (2017), along with numerous articles and chapters on international migration, diplomacy, and empire.

Citation: David C. Atkinson. Review of Rollo, Stuart. Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60309

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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From Amazon: 

Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire Kindle Edition

by Stuart Rollo (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

3.0 3.0 out of 5 stars

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A sweeping narrative of America's imperial history and its long entanglement with China.

In Terminus, Stuart Rollo examines the origins and trajectory of American empire in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing on its westward expansion and historic entanglement with China. American foreign and strategic policy in this region, Rollo argues, has always been shaped by broader economic and political concerns centered on China. China's current rise, and the economic and strategic systems that China is developing, represents the most serious challenge to the structure of American empire to date.

Rollo paints a sweeping historical narrative of American imperial history and its relationship with China from 1776 to the present. Grounded in archival research, official and personal correspondence, policy documents, declassified intelligence material, and congressional records, Terminus traces the development of American empire building from the pre-independence period to the eve of World War I, arguing that this new empire was primarily driven by commercial interests in China. Rollo explores shifts in global power, resource politics, and international economic structures that led the United States to transition from one of several imperial powers to the world's sole superpower by the last decade of the twentieth century. Finally, he examines the decline of American empire since its brief period of unipolarity in the 1990s, explaining the new pressures and challenges posed by the rise of China.

Rollo proposes three scenarios for how the United States might manage its inevitable imperial decline: a vain attempt to shore up and extend the empire, an exploitative hegemony, or a post-imperial foreign policy. This last option would work to repair the damaged fabric of American social and political life, providing a long-term, stable foundation for national security, prosperity, and the well-being of its citizens. All empires eventually end, but with the benefit of hindsight, Rollo urges us to consider how to engineer a softer landing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Important, insightful, and timely, this is an extraordinary synthesis of an incredibly comprehensive subject. I could never have imagined it possible to summarize the economic, political, and cultural history of US-Chinese relations over 225 years, yet Rollo has succeeded. The research is impressive, both for its thoroughness and selectivity.
―Walter Allan McDougall, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest

The first book to develop a historical analysis of the American empire through the lens of the US-China relationship, Terminus addresses the most challenging issue in the contemporary world: the great power rivalry between the United States and China. Rollo offers a comprehensive survey of the rivalry, entanglement, and decoupling of the United States and China in global trade, investment, and production as well as the growing role of China in undermining the US empire in such areas as capital formation, technology innovation, and global production and supply chains.
―Baogang He, Deakin University, author of Contested Ideas of Regionalism in Asia

Narrating the rise and decline of the American empire through the prism of US-China relations, Stuart Rollo has written a succinct, sophisticated, and hard-hitting critique. The appearance of Terminuscould not be more timely―nor or its contents more worrisome.
―Andrew Bacevich, Chairman and Cofounder, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

 

About the Author

Stuart Rollo (SYDNEY, AUS) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

 

Product details

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 296 pp. $55.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421447384

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BWSKD9VM

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press (October 31, 2023)

Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 31, 2023

Language ‏ : ‎ English

File size ‏ : ‎ 4171 KB

 

Os árabes otomanos no Brasil, 1850-1940: livro de Jose D. Najar: Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940

 Greetings Paulo Roberto Almeida,

A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm.

Rom on Najar, 'Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940'

Najar, Jose D..  Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. 356 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781496214683.

Reviewed by Michael Rom (University of British Columbia)
Published on H-LatAm (February, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59839

In August 2016, when Michel Temer became the president of Brazil, residents of São Paulo found themselves represented on all three levels of government by politicians of Syrian-Lebanese descent. In addition to Temer, whose parents were from the Lebanese village of Btaaboura, these politicians included the governor of São Paulo state, Geraldo Alckmin, and the mayor of São Paulo city, Fernando Haddad. All three came from different political parties across the political spectrum, evidence both of the important role that Syrian-Lebanese Brazilians have played in contemporary Brazilian politics, and of the ideological diversity of the community itself.

José D. Najar’s new book, Transimperial Anxieties: The Making of Arab Ottomans in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940, provides valuable insights into the creation of São Paulo’s Syrian-Lebanese community. The book, which draws on original research conducted at the municipal and state archives of São Paulo, the Brazilian national archives, and the archives of the Brazilian foreign ministry, offers three major contributions to the study of Syrian-Lebanese Brazilians. First, it reframes the transnational history of Syrian-Lebanese immigration to a transimperial history that explores connections between the nineteenth-century Brazilian and Ottoman Empires. Second, it examines the integration of Arab Ottomans in Brazil within the context of their whiteness in a highly stratified multiracial society. Finally, it highlights the overlooked importance of Syrian-Lebanese women in the socioeconomic upward mobility of Arab Ottoman immigrants.

The first chapter analyzes nineteenth-century Brazilian ideas about the Ottoman Empire. It shows how Brazilian politicians used Orientalist attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire as a foil for challenging the failures of the Brazilian Empire, while assessing the Rio de Janeiro press’s coverage of ethnic and religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Building on this research, the second chapter considers how Brazilian-Ottoman imperial diplomacy, especially the 1858 Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation, enabled Brazilian and Ottoman subjects to travel to and reside in each other’s empires, even as they remained subjects of the empire of their birth. While the chapter notes that increasing numbers of Arab Ottomans took advantage of these provisions to immigrate to Brazil, it does not give the reader a sense of the number of Ottoman immigrants involved, or any insight into the lives that they lived in imperial Brazil.

Chapter 3 moves to the cusp of the republican era, exploring a blood libel that saw many Arab peddlers accused of the murder and cannibalism of Brazilian children, and which led to the expulsion of many of these peddlers from towns across the states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Najar situates the origin of this libel in the anxieties resulting from the impending abolition of slavery and astutely likens it to antisemitic blood libels that targeted Jews in Europe. But he fails to fully elucidate why Syrian-Lebanese peddlers were its specific targets. Did anti-Arab blood libels draw on antisemitic conspiracy theories, equating Arab immigrants with the more familiar figure of the Wandering Jew? Or did Syrian-Lebanese peddlers merely occupy a similar social niche as economic outsiders in a largely culturally homogenous society? Moreover, while Najar draws extensively on Po-chia Hsia’s classic study The Myth of Ritual Murder (1988), he does not engage with newer scholarship on the transnational phenomenon of antisemitic blood libels by historians such as Elissa Bemporad, Hillel Kieval, and Magda Teter.

The fourth chapter examines intriguing conflicts within the Syrian-Lebanese community during World War I around competing loyalties to the Ottoman Empire and independence for Syria and Lebanon. These conflicts involved journalists in the local Arab press as well as members of the newly formed Syrian-Lebanese Patriotic Society, an organization that promoted Syrian and Lebanese independence. While these conflicts, which involved verbal attacks and even outright murder, offer much insight into the Syrian-Lebanese community’s shifting transnational loyalties at a time of geopolitical transformation, it is unclear how they fit into the debates over Arab Ottomans’ contested whiteness that Najar has used to frame this and the following chapter.

Chapter 5 considers three court cases between Syrian-Lebanese merchants and peddlers around the turn of the twentieth century. Najar argues that by turning to courts in order to recover stolen merchandise, Arab Ottoman businessmen were performing their whiteness as honorable citizens, even as members of the community found guilty in these legal disputes effectively “darkened” the community’s reputation by embodying Orientalist tropes about dishonesty and criminality. While this is certainly a provocative argument, the evidence that Najar has provided is not sufficient to substantiate it. It appears from the legal testimonies analyzed that the primary motivation of the Arab Ottoman plaintiffs was in fact to recuperate their lost goods, rather than affirm their whiteness or citizenship, while there is little indication as to how these trials impacted the popular image of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Brazil.

The final two chapters turn to gender in order to complicate received notions about the maleness of most early Arab Ottoman peddlers. Chapter 6 analyzes the life histories of three Syrian-Lebanese female peddlers, using these life histories to show that women also played important roles in the socioeconomic upward mobility of the Syrian-Lebanese community. Meanwhile, chapter 7 explores diplomatic efforts to repatriate Brazilian women married to allegedly abusive or negligent Syrian Muslim men and living in the Middle East, and the attempts of Syrian-Lebanese Christians to assist in these repatriation efforts while simultaneously endeavoring to defend Muslim masculinity in order to safeguard their own belonging in Brazil.

Through police records, court cases, diplomatic correspondence, and the Brazilian press, Najar presents a plethora of sources through which to rethink Syrian-Lebanese ideas about empire, whiteness, and gender in Brazil. Particularly welcome is his analytical linking of antisemitism and Orientalism, even though his decision to substitute a clunky neologism of his own creation, “Judia(r)ção” (to Jew/Jewing, a pejorative word meaning to cheat or deceive in both English and Portuguese), for the more conventional term “antisemitism,” is a rather perplexing one. More significantly, Najar’s choice to rely entirely on Portuguese sources, despite his recognition of the importance of the Brazilian Arabic press as a historical source, results in a necessarily partial view of the Syrian-Lebanese community. One hopes that future work on Arab Brazilians will combine Najar’s conceptual innovations with research in Arabic as well as Portuguese sources in order to provide a more comprehensive approach to Syrian-Lebanese ethnic history in Brazil.

Citation: Michael Rom. Review of Najar, Jose D.. Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. February, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59839

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities (on nationalism) - David Polansky (Foreign Policy)

The Greatest Book on Nationalism Keeps Being Misread

“Imagined Communities” is far weirder than you remember.

 

By David Polansky, a political theorist and research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

FOREIGN POLICY, JANUARY 7, 2024, 7:00 AM

 

There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s classic horror-comedy Evil Dead II in which the protagonist saws off his own zombified hand and traps it under a copy of A Farewell to Arms. This is an intentional joke, but a similar titular misreading has haunted another 1980s classic: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

Due to a combination of the title’s pithiness and its well-established place on college syllabi, few works of social science have been so widely misunderstood. It is in that rarified genre of books more written about than read (officially known as the “Fukuyama Club”). For many readers appear to have taken the title literally, supposing that he treated nations as somehow fictional. His actual thesis, however, was more subtle. For Anderson, nationalism is imagined rather than imaginary — though too many readers only noted the first part.

He recognizes, in other words, that nations are historical creations rather than natural expressions of some authentic pre-political identity, but he does not assume this invalidates them. Thus (to take examples with particular contemporary relevance), Zionism is both a late 19th-century invention and a reality for Israeli citizens. Palestinian nationalism is both a derivation of a larger modern movement of Arab nationalism and the source of a recognizable collective identity. Nagorno-Karabakh acquired new (and mutually exclusive) significance for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, without thereby being any less consequential. All of these and more are real and meaningful, even when their historical claims are convenient.

And yet, being widely misread is still a greater legacy than most scholars can boast. And, indeed, the work’s scholarly footprint is substantial; four decades out, it remains one of the most-cited works in all the social sciences, and more to the point it is “by far the most cited text in the study of nationalism.” This is probably less an indication of widespread commitment to Anderson’s specific theses regarding the role of print capitalism or the role of New World states in the development of nationalism and more a testament to the way his book, and its title, came to stand in for a larger intellectual shift in the study of nationalism.

In the wake of the nationalist furies unleashed by the end of the Cold War, we are perhaps more sharply aware now of the themes of Imagined Communities than its contemporary readers were. But why more than two centuries into the age of nationalism and decades after the first wave of decolonization, when the study of nationalism only saw an efflorescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s? Anderson himself notes in a much-cited remark that “unlike most other isms, nationalism [had] never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.”

The book’s shaped the study of nationalism—but it did so in a way that was sui generis. This quintessential work of modern social science is in fact quite nonrepresentative of the discipline. It proceeds unsystematically, veering into highly poetic digressions throughout, from literary references to autobiographical details. In fact, Anderson’s influential account of nationalism is ultimately poetic both in the sense that he emphasizes the role of language and literature in the formation of nations and in the sense that his own arguments themselves take poetic forms. That makes it, unlike many of its peers, remarkably readable—and has no doubt contributed to its shelf life.

Its distinctiveness surely owes something to its author. In a fascinating posthumous essay, Anderson noted how his imagination was spurred one day at Cornell from overhearing Allan Bloom in full pomp remark how the ancient Greeks had no concept of “power” as we understand it, which subsequently set him off on his own study of that theme in Javanese culture.

Several of Anderson’s qualities are on display here, all of which shape the book. One is his ability to make unexpected intellectual connections across domains and cultures. Another is his strong historical sense—what the great classicist Peter Brown calls a historicized imagination. The last is his strong orientation toward Southeast Asia, a region to which he remained devoted for much of his life. In a nice bit of biographical caesura, though Anderson was barred for decades from visiting Indonesia owing to a critical analysis of Gen. Suharto’s coup, he spent much of his retirement there, ultimately dying in Java in 2015.

This last might not be remarkable for a historian or professor of “area studies,” but it was for a time unique among scholars of nationalism, who tended to focus on its development in early modern Europe, more or less in parallel with the literature on the rise of the modern state. Anderson’s approach thus stood out even during a time of broader revisionism when it came to the study of nationalism.

Even beyond his wider geographical ambit, his practical experience with how waning colonial systems gave way to elite-shaping national consciousnesses in places like Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines accorded his work a real sense of how nationalism actually emerged. Unlike more analytical works, Anderson’s work seemed to ask—to paraphrase a famous philosophy paper—what is it like to be a nationalist?

Some background is probably in order here. Part of what drove this movement to study nationalism anew was the apprehension that nations and nationalism were, in fact, modern creations, and that nationalism was something stranger and more complex than merely the political expression of a supposedly authentic pre-political nation. This view, labeled “modernist,” was set against the so-called perennialists, at least some of whom were themselves galvanized to develop their own theories in response to the modernist challenge (the usual caveats that this brief description greatly oversimplifies the scholarly debates apply).

Yet Anderson’s relationship to this group was always somewhat ambiguous. Anderson accepts the modernist view, he does not therefore assign it a pejorative slant or deny its validity—he explicitly distinguishes himself from his near-contemporary Ernest Gellner, whose own treatment emphasized the inherent falseness of nationalism.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

 

But the modernist in him also celebrates nationalism for its instrumental role in the process of decolonization. Here, his particular engagement with Southeast Asia dovetailed with his left-wing political sympathies. This may in fact be the most striking thing for a reader encountering it today—even in the later revised editions: how much of Anderson’s considerations play out within the context of Marxism.

His thought was steeped in Marxism, though his treatment was never dogmatic. To begin with, honesty compelled him to take seriously the national conflicts that he saw erupting between Marxist nations.

In this he resembles his brother, the historian and social critic Perry Anderson, whose trenchant commentary still graces issues of the London Review of Books. It is difficult for us at the other end of history to recall (assuming we were there in the first place) the overwhelming presence of Marxist ideas at the time, but much of the show Anderson puts on makes more sense when viewed in light of his intended audience (though Marxist ideas are hardly absent from academia today, they no longer enjoy the hegemony they once held over entire areas of study). It may seem bizarre to us now, but Anderson was at the time fighting a bit of an uphill battle to demonstrate that national identities, however recent, were not less real or consequential than the movements of capital or material production that were and are the chief preoccupations of Marxists.

Anderson himself takes a largely benign view of such movements without sharing the internal perspective of those working from within them (that they are participating in the formal establishment of an authentic pre-existing social identity). How, then, does he expect us to judge their successes or failures? The implicit answer, I think—particularly given Anderson’s Marxist leanings—is to look to the material well-being of the real people that a given nation purports to represent. There, the record has been mixed, from the bloody methods of decolonization in places like Algeria and Vietnam to the fratricidal viciousness by which former neighbors decoupled themselves during the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the extraordinary economic achievement of pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere cannot be decoupled from the social cohesion that nationalism provides. Anderson himself thus characterizes nationalism’s legacy as “Janus-headed.”

As I write this, the enduring conflict between two opposed nationalisms in the Levant has erupted again into terrible violence. Imagining a beneficent nationalism seems harder than ever. Perhaps for this reason, many outsiders have increasingly embraced a binational solution to the conflict—a kind of nationalism without nationalism—regardless of the actual preferences of the protagonists. And when confronted with such visible evidence of nationalism’s hard edge—the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7, or the Israel Defense Force’s ongoing shelling of Gaza—it is understandable that many would blanch at what it really entails.

And it is similarly understandable that one may ask in the face of this and so many other conflicts—from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and Pakistan to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and beyond—just what people get from nationalism. Why do they imagine this and not some other form of community? One answer is that at the level of practical reality, the nation provides the form for the ordinary liberal goods we enjoy. In another classic of modern social science, Seeing Like a State, James Scott described the state as “the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.” Something like this is true of nationalism as well: that for all its capacity for violence, it also makes possible the bounded community within which we gain protections of individual rights and welfare benefits and security.

Anderson goes beyond this, however; his view of nations is not just instrumental. And perhaps for this reason the language we use to describe these conflicts today is very much his language. Hence the use of mythologized histories to legitimize territorial claims. And hence also the attempts to force the Israel-Palestine conflict into the framework of decolonization, in which a righteous emerging nationalism confronts a system of oppressive domination.

But what happens when two authentic nationalisms compete for the same territory? And while we may speak of the self-sacrificing love the nation inspires, what makes these sacrifices worthwhile in the end? The poetic resonances of Anderson’s treatment of nationalism have been widely recognized—but even poetry has its limits.

David Polansky is a political theorist who writes on geopolitics and the history of political thought. He is currently a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

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