The History of Brazil

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other destination in the Americas, and did not abolish slavery until 1888 - the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. How does that country become an emerging economic power, a functioning democracy, and custodian of sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest?

This book follows Brazil across five centuries, from a Portuguese fleet blown off course to India in 1500 to a nation of two hundred million negotiating inequality, deforestation, and unfinished promises. Four threads run through it: slavery's aftermath, a fight over who governs, a boom-and-bust economy tied to whatever commodity the world wants next, and an uneasy relationship with its own interior.

Inside, you'll find:

• A trade that reshaped a hemisphere. Between 4 million and 4.9 million enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil - roughly ten times the number brought to the United States - and freedom, in 1888, came with no compensation for the newly freed.
• A five-year capital built from nothing. In 1960, Brazil opened Brasília, a modernist capital carved from empty highland, betting a new city could drag an agrarian, coastal nation into the twentieth century.
• Twenty-one years of growth and repression. The 1964-1985 military dictatorship delivered real growth alongside censorship and torture; Brazil's Truth Commission has confirmed 434 dead or disappeared, a number most historians call a floor, not a ceiling.
• A currency that stopped losing value overnight. After decades where prices could double in weeks, a 1994 plan ended hyperinflation with no price freeze.

No background in Brazilian history is required.

Brazil has spent five hundred years being called the country of the future. This book asks what that has actually meant, decade by decade.