Enlightened Agriculture: International Science and Agricultural Modernization in the Revista Agrícola de Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura, 1869–89

The Imperial Fluminense Institute of Agriculture was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1869 by a cohort of forward-thinking planters, scientists, and capitalists who together represented an interesting cross-section of Brazil’s elite.  Among them counted the Baron of Mauá, a banker and industrialist; the Baron of Cotegipe, a conservative politician, intimate of the Brazilian emperor, and member of one of the most distinguished planter families of Bahia; and the Baron of Capanema, the European-educated and Brazilian-born son of German immigrants.  Supported by both public and private funds, the central objective of the institute was promoting agricultural improvement in Brazil.  This included the introduction and development of new agricultural technologies, the acclimatization of imported crops, the identification of new, economically useful Brazilian species, and the improvement of traditional crops such as sugar and coffee.  An additional purpose of the school was to produce a generation of operários-pensadores (“laborer-thinkers”) who would improve Brazilian agriculture less through “purely physical” labor (slavery), than with intellectual practices that would “patiently pave” the way to Brazil’s future.

            Using the institute’s quarterly publication, the Revista Agrícola de Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura, this essay argues that the institute emerged as an early — and overlooked— site for the beginning of Brazilian agricultural science that drew its support from a diverse swath, politically speaking, of the Brazilian elite.  The journal contained reports on the institute’s activities and experiments, articles on more mundane subjects such as the chemical composition of fertilizer, and beautifully illustrated plates of foreign and domestically-produced agricultural machinery.  Articles translated from French, German, and especially U.S. agricultural journals demonstrated that institute members were very much informed by agricultural science on both sides of the Atlantic.  Together, the scientific and technological articles published in the Revista Agrícola provide insight into the beginnings of agricultural science in Brazil.