Abstract

Today, few foods are more central to Brazilian national cuisine than beef. However, the connections between beef and Brazil are anything but inevitable. Until the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian beef industry remained a relatively marginal part of the domestic and global economy. This situation changed dramatically in the century between 1880 and 1980, when Brazilian beef became an increasingly core constituent of the national diet and a global commodity. This shift was not simply a matter of dietary change but the outcome of intersecting processes: internal projects of nation-building and modernisation, which sought to define and standardise Brazilian food culture, and external pressures exerted by imperial powers, including the United States, Britain, Japan, and Portugal, that reshaped patterns of production, trade, and consumption.

Bio

Oscar Broughton recently completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. He is currently a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) at Leipzig University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London.

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