Papers presented by Anne Hanley since 2019
2022 Mexico City
"The Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Printing Houses and Government Statistics"
Anne Hanley, Northern Illinois Unviersity
Abstract:
The paper derives from my research on standardization efforts in nineteenth-century Brazil. Frustrated by its lack of a complete understanding of national demographic, geographic, and other resources, members of the Brazilian scientific and political elite advocated for more and better data for better governance. Its members embraced the international rise of statistics and standardization, participating actively in international symposia designed to improve scientific cooperation and commercial exchange. At home, they financed and participated in voyages to the Brazilian interior to document the demographic and natural resources of this new nation in order to understand its potential riches and the challenges of infrastructure to tap them. Throughout these ventures, beginning in the 1830s with calls for standards and better data for better governance, and continuing on into the twentieth century, Brazilians expressed a keen enthusiasm for documenting the Brazilian nation. Critics of the Brazilian state who study this phenomenon argue that these efforts were made by out of touch elites who ineptly attempted to expand their administrative capacity. This approach dismisses the powerful effect the enthusiasm for data, this drive to “see” the new nation, had on printing houses. The Brazilian state produced reams of annual reports packed with data that expressed their unfolding understanding of the national territory--its endowments and its challenges. I examine the printing houses, public and private, that sprang up in Rio de Janeiro in response to this demand. At the height of the drive for data to direct modernization and standardization efforts in the 1860s and 1870s alone, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture utilized the services of 13 different printing houses, shifting between them from year to year and sometimes using several in a single year. I map the emergence and presence of the printing houses both chronologically and geographically, focusing on publications by the two ministries tasked with Brazil’s economic development, the Ministry of Empire (Interior) and the Ministry of Agriculture, from the 1830s to the end of empire in 1889.