Continuities and Contradictions in the Evolution of Brazilian Dependence

Abstract

Bags of coffee loaded onto the ships that docked in the port of Santos were Brazil's link to the international economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. International trade of unparalleled dimensions was coupled with capitalist accumulation of equally unparalleled scale in the center countries of the system. Countries at the periphery of the system helped support the accumulation of capital in the center by producing primary products and consuming the manufactured goods turned out by the factories in the center. Few played their role better than Brazil. Brazil's foremost partner at the center, Britain, played its role with equal adeptness. While Germany, the United States, and other European countries all competed at the center of the system, Britain was pre-eminent. Britain and Brazil together provide a concrete definition of the classic model of dependency. Classic dependency worked well for the British and for the Brazilian coffee planters, but despite the wealth, power, and ingenuity of its beneficiaries, the system could not be preserved. Its own development created forces of production and social groups that eventually transformed it into a very different kind of political economy. Fifty years after the First World War first disrupted the international system that the British had constructed, Brazil was producing most of its own manufactured goods. Brazilians were selling more and more of their manufactures on the international market, while the British were having increasing difficulty finding buyers. In some respects at least, the classic system of dependency had been turned upside down. Dependency had been transformed by the seventies, but imperialism was still very much alive. Direct investments, North American and European, gave foreign capital from the center countries greater control over the workings of the Brazilian economy than ever before. The need for capital goods and intermediate products to keep the new industrial structure operating made Brazil as dependent on foreign imports as ever. Imperialism had been internalized, and Brazil had been incorporated into a set of property relations and organizational structures based in the center countries. The models developed to fit the system of classic dependency, like those of Baran (1968), Prebisch (1964) and Frank (1967), are well known. Even more