Brazil is the fifth-largest country on the planet, and about 90 percent of its territory is located within the tropics. This makes Brazil the largest tropical country and the most biodiverse on Earth. Especially since its process of state building in the 19th century, the image of the Brazilian nation has been intensely associated with the ideal of an exuberant and sumptuous nature, a land of fertility and abundance, like the Amazon rainforest. However, within this gigantic and diverse territory, there were many areas that differed from that nation ideal, like the semi-arid zone located mainly in the countryside of the region that from the middle of the 20th century became known as the Brazilian Northeast. Integrating this semi-arid zone - that is considered the largest tropical dry forest in South America - into the nation project headed by the Imperial Court in Rio de Janeiro was an important challenge in the construction of Brazil in the 19th century.
The climate issue was a decisive key to guiding this process. Although the famous drought in 1877 still frequently appears as the starting point for the importance of the political debate on the semi-arid climate in Brazil, the relations between climate and power in this territory were made earlier. Since the beginnings of the Brazilian Empire in the 1820s, for example, policies to deal with these climatic phenomena were decisive to articulate the power between local elites and the empire. These policies were transformed from occasional succors like groceries especially to water reservoirs after the 1840s. Handling the rainless climate would be crucial to uphold the imperial order in that semi-arid territory. The empire sought to have control not only over the people but also over the weather. However, this relationship between the empire and the “arid hinterland” took shape within the political and environmental Brazilian puzzle at that time, rather than a mere imposition from the court.
Article
The “Arid Sertões” and the Climate Issue in the 19th-Century Brazilian Empire
Gabriel Pereira de Oliveira
Article
Drought and the Origins of the Mexican Revolution
Mikael D. Wolfe
What role did drought play in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910? Although historians of the Mexican Revolution acknowledge that the effects of drought helped catalyze it, they have not explored in any depth what connects drought to revolution. Instead, they usually subsume it within a more general discussion of agricultural cycles to explain the conduct and fortunes of popular revolutionary armies. In particular, they reference the onset of drought between 1907 and 1909 as exacerbating an economic downturn induced by severe recession in the United States. By then, Mexico had become economically integrated with its northern neighbor through rapidly growing foreign investment, trade, and cross-border migration facilitated by the railroad transportation revolution. These socioeconomic and ecological factors together led to steep declines in wages and earnings, devastating crop failures, spikes in food prices (principally corn and beans), and even famine in the lower and middle classes.
Although suggestive, such passing references to drought in the historiography of the revolution do not furnish a clear picture of its effects and how they may have contributed to social and political conflict. In the 21st century, new technologies, methods, and sources—from historical meteorological reports and climate-related accounts gleaned from archival sources to modern historical climatological data reconstructions—facilitate doing more rigorous climate history. This article provides a sampling of these methods and sources on the role of drought in late 19th- and early 20th-century Mexico that can supplement, elucidate, and even revise our understanding of the origins of the Mexican Revolution.
