XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

"A Third Path: Connected and Comparative Histories of Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal"

• In Event: Connected Brazil: National and Transnational Relations from the Nineteenth to the Twenty First Century - Part II

Abstract

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In this paper, I center the production of economic knowledge and policy interventions in the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic to explore how Brazil’s and Portugal’s interwar governments approached economic decline and political instability. By tracing the movement of people and ideas across the South Atlantic, this talk explores how two countries not often studied for their economic creativity became major centers for policy experimentation. Portuguese and Brazilian officials created laws and agencies to control pricing and production, which in turn generated new social frictions and economic problems, as individuals and firms tried to evade the rules. Over the past twenty years, historians have made a strong case that we must think beyond the nation-state to understand how new ideological tool kits and policies emerge. Connections between Brazilian and Portuguese intellectuals and bureaucrats not only amplified the diffusion of corporatist ideas abroad but also legitimized the rise of dictatorships to put this third path into practice at home. Those who supported the dictatorships of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and António de Oliveira Salazar did so by consistently defending corporatism as ideally suited to their societies by mobilizing sociological, cultural, and racial arguments. To anchor this connected and comparative history of economic policymaking in Brazil and Portugal is thus also to contend with the real and imagined afterlives of imperial bonds.

Author

• Melissa Teixeira, University of Pennsylvania