The Interior is my second editing collaboration with Jacob Blanc. It will be out with The University of Texas Press in late 2024. As the subtitle indicates, the book is an attempt to look at Brazilian history from the country’s vast interior, from colonial times to the present. It contains chapters from twelve leading scholars of Brazil (who are from Brazil, the US, and the UK). From the book promotion material:

“In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized by coastal adventurers and overseen by the central state. This proposed divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination. It has perpetuated the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery merely awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. However, this perception could not be further from the truth.

To challenge these simplistic narratives that juxtapose the coast against the interior, this edited volume critically reexamines the history of Brazil from an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history—and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. To do so, the editors of The Interior have assembled a team of twelve leading historians, cultural scholars, and social scientists from Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Their chapters highlight how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. They reevaluate traditional topics in Brazilian history, shedding fresh light on its various critical moments. While a substantial portion of Brazilian scholarship has traditionally framed the interior regions within the context of the country’s coastal areas, The Interior reimagines Brazil’s hinterland as a novel framework for historical analysis. Going beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history and surpassing the current wave of regionalism scholarship in Brazil, such an exploration seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the role of the interior in the history of Latin America’s largest nation.”

Table of Contents

Introduction – Frederico Freitas and Jacob Blanc

PART I: THE KNOWLEDGE INTERIOR

1. Indigenous Spies and Surveillance in Late Colonial Brazil – Heather F. Roller

2. Imagined Sertões: The Quest for Silver, Indigenous Conquest, and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Bahian Interior – Judy Bieber

3. The Interior as Borderlands: The Campanha at the Edge of Empire – Fabrício Prado

4. São Paulo and Its Interior in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries – Carlos A. P. Bacellar

PART II: THE NATIONAL INTERIOR

5. Moral Grounds: Plants and Plans for Imperial Brazil’s Backlands – Seth Garfield

6. The Romantic Sertões – Lúcia Sá

7. Charting the Planalto Central: The Quest for a New Capital and the Opening of the Brazilian Interior in the 1890s – Frederico Freitas

PART III: THE ROVING INTERIOR

8. The Wandering Bororo of Central Brazil in Photo Albums and the 1908 National Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro – Antonio Luigi Negro

9. A Cartographic Picaresque: The Prestes Column and the Symbolism of Brazil’s Interior – Jacob Blanc

PART IV: THE TRANSFORMED INTERIOR

10. The March toward the Hinterland: The West as Geographic Fiction and the Conquering of Central Brazil – Sandro Dutra e Silva

11. From Boi Gordo to Biofuel: Western São Paulo and the Transformation of Rural Brazil – Thomas D. Rogers

Epilogue: The Interior and the Scale of History – Susanna Hecht

Acknowledgments

Contributors