Planting the Future of Brazil: Economic Botany and the Conquest of the 19th-Century Frontier

This paper examines the importance of guaraná, a caffeine-rich native Amazonian cultivar, in the geopolitical visions of nineteenth-century Brazilian statesmen. Due to its importance in interprovincial trade in northwestern Brazil, guarana was touted by scientists as fundamental to sustaining precarious communication and transport links in the nation’s heartland. The plant also achieved nationalistic symbolism based on its endemism and its historical association with indigenous peoples. Thus, the paper seeks to revisit the nineteenth-century construction of Brazilian nationalism through a focus on indigenous history, environmental history and the history of science.