Jürgen Schneider’s monograph on Franco-Brazilian trade is the most recent contribution by and to the “Kellenbenz school” of international history. In the introduction to this dissertation, which he directed, Hermann Kellenbenz writes that one of his primary research interests has been “the illumination of the relations of European ports to the world overseas and of their significance for the rise of industrial society.” Five of the ten studies published in the series he edits, deal with aspects of that theme. Schneider’s book forms volume nine. Working in national, departmental, and municipal archives, libraries and chambers of commerce in France (especially in Le Havre) and Switzerland, Schneider has compiled statistics on virtually every aspect of Franco-Brazilian trade. He discusses tariff policy, examines each of the major ports in both countries, analyzes the type and volume of goods exported and imported, sketches the backgrounds and tangled connections of all the overseas trading firms, lists shipping activity by number of sailings and arrivals, cargo value and ship tonnage. He provides information on Brazilian commerce with many countries besides France, discusses the special characteristics of each nation’s trade and of its merchant class, offers fascinating vignettes on the dubious methods by which foreign merchants used or circumvented Brazilian regulations, and crisply summarizes Brazil’s currency problems.
Like his mentor and the other authors in this series, Schneider has a ravenous appetite for detail, both biographical and statistical. This volume is virtually an annotated statistical handbook. Most of the text is a commentary on the hundreds of tables and graphs Schneider includes. A compassionate author would have relegated these to an appendix—he already has a seventy-four-page appendix—and given a readable discussion in the text. The book’s subtitle, “An Attempt at a Quantitative Structural Analysis,” has a deceptively theoretical ring. In fact the book is not “structuralist” in spirit, nor has it anything to do with the new Economic History. It is a compendium. Kellenbenz has long argued that entrepreneurial biography is an integral part of social and economic history, and Schneider, like other scholars in this series, has diligently collected information on businessmen. But to what end? He offers no sociological interpretation of the material, apart from the familiar conclusion that Protestants, often descendants of families that fled to Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), played a disproportionately large role in French commerce. Long sections of the book are nothing more than the author’s card files on trading firms, one paragraph per card. This mechanical approach is not likely to win friends for entrepreneurial studies. As for explaining the “rise of industrial society,” Schneider says only that protectionism retarded French economic growth; an accurate conclusion, but hardly novel.
Is this book international history, or merely two loosely connected national studies? By the standards of a pioneering work like Brinley Thomas’ Migration and Economic Growth (2d ed., Cambridge, 1973), which traces an organic process affecting the entire “Atlantic eonomy,” only the latter description is appropriate. Even the author seems to agree, for he calls his study 1) a “contribution to French economic history in the nineteenth century,” and 2) a “building block for a comparative history of Brazilian foreign trade.” (p. v). If there are broader results implicit in his figures, Schneider has not discovered them. His general conclusions fit easily into the three to four-page summaries (in German, French, Portuguese and English) attached to the end of the work—almost everything else is raw data.
