The Syndicat Commercial du Mobilier et du matériel d’Enseignement and the transnational trade of school artefacts (Brazil and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article explores the role of the Syndicat du matériel et mobilier scolaire de l’enseignement in supplying French school materials to several countries, including Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, in order to demonstrate the profitability of a new industry, the school industry, and of a new type of trade, the transnational trade in school artefacts used as didactic resources. It is divided into four parts. The Introduction presents the context in which this commercial activity flourished, favoured by the developments of the second industrial revolution and the new educational guidelines associated with mass schooling and the method of “object lessons”. Next, it characterises the enterprise in Brazil, from the presentation of commercial agents operating in the states of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo to the identification of the strategies mobilised for the sale and importation from France of school artefacts, conceived as merchandise. In the third part the lens is reversed, and the objective is to examine the ways in which purchases were made by the public education administration in São Paulo. As a final comment, the article reaffirms the connections between the values of capitalist society, consumption practices and the material elementary schooling universe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.