Drought and development: Technocrats and the politics of modernization in Brazil\u27s semi -arid northeast, 1877–1964

This dissertation examines technical aid provided by engineers, medical sanitarians, agronomists and economists to alleviate drought in Northeast Brazil. It draws on recent literature in the history of science and medicine, environmental history, and the history of economic development projects. Focusing primarily on the years from 1909 to 1959, it considers the intellectual and political constraints on scientific developers\u27 work that limited their ability to reduce the Brazilian sertão\u27s periodic drought crisis. Archival material and published primary documents were collected from Brazilian institutions in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Pernambuco, and Fortaleza, Ceará, as well as from several specialized libraries and archives in the United States. Current engineers and sociologists of Northeast drought provided insights into the sertão\u27s history of misguided or inadequate development efforts. Drought relief was promoted as a way to modernize the sertão and rescue its inhabitants from famine and migration. Yet in the several political periods analyzed (Brazil\u27s First Republic, Vargas era, and the developmentalist decade of the 1950s), it was not implemented in a way that increased the security of landless and smallholder sertanejos most adversely affected by climatic fluctuation. Northeast elites frequently used drought relief to draw federal resources to their region, for infrastructural improvements. In examining technocrats\u27 failure to transform the sertão through science and technology, I consider the significance of their faith in the apolitical and context-independent nature of their expertise. This is characteristic of many scientific development endeavors during the twentieth century, when models from one region of the world (such as the United States) were adopted in regions with very different social and political organization (like Northeast Brazil). My study present a very different picture of science in the developing world than current historiography of colonial and post-colonial science suggests. Rather than acting as powerful instruments for the exercise of state power, scientists in the sertão were severely limited by the conservative agendas of a landowning elite. Instead of remaking the sertão landscape to suit development agencies\u27 interests, technocrats\u27 efforts served largely to reinforce existing social and political relations---which were arguably the root of the drought crisis