Moral Grounds: Plant and Plans for Imperial Brazil's Backlands

This paper explores the plans of nineteenth-century engineer João Martins da Silva Coutinho for the Amazon frontier. Linked to emergent Brazilian scientific institutions, Silva Coutinho attributed a key role to guaraná in Amazonian geopolitics. As the “heart of the trade” on the Madeira river and the Tapajós river, two large tributaries of the Amazon that flowed northward through the province of Mato Grosso, guaraná served as an agent of Brazilian national integration. Guaraná also epitomized a purported pathway to commercial agriculture and sedentarization of the Amazonian labor force. As a crop cultivated and traded by the Sateré-Mawé, guaraná conveyed as well the potential of Native Amazonian peoples, a core tenet of Latin American indigenismo. In other words, Silva Coutinho advanced the agendas of Brazil’s imperial government and nineteenth-century Brazilian scientific institutions in promoting Amazonian exploration, frontier colonization, resource extraction, and demarcation of South American international borders.