Herbert Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna have formed a prolific partnership over the past two decades producing a half dozen or so coauthored books. This social and economic survey of Brazilian history draws on some of their other works, most notably The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (2014) and Modern Brazil: A Social History (2020), both also published by Cambridge University Press. It forges much further back into the past than these two previous works, covering not only colonial and imperial Brazil but all the way back to the first peopling of the Americas. As with their other work, this is a data-heavy volume with dozens of graphs and tables throughout with a strong emphasis on demography. This should hardly be surprising for two scholars who have been practitioners of quantitative, social science history since the 1960s (Klein) and 1970s (Luna).

After an introductory chapter on the...

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