This compendium of physiographic, social, cultural, economic, and political data consists of some 150 tables, many of them several pages long. Materials are largely confined to the national period, with a large preponderance of twentieth-century data. Each chapter is introduced with a commentary on lacunae in the data, as well as a description of works from which the information was taken. All materials are from published sources, but the tables are sometimes based on 20 separate items. Most sources are official ones, but in some cases the author has culled data from scholarly monographs (e.g., estimates of the size of the pre–1500 Amerindian population).
Ludwig offers detailed descriptions of how the data were compiled, and provides critical definitions when these are given in the sources; when not, he notes the fact. In addition, many chapters include brief institutional histories of the agencies that generated or compiled the data.
Given the wide array of sources surveyed, there are no doubt weaknesses that specialists would detect. Federal budgets present a number of problems, many of which are noted. One not noted is the absence of figures for semiautonomous government corporations: incredibly, until 1979 the central government did not know how much these entities were earning and spending.
This handbook will be especially useful to social and economic historians. There are, for example, data on the demographic composition, budgets, and incomes of families in recent decades. On criminality, there are convenient summaries of arrests, convictions, and sentences, as well as prison statistics, for our century. In the economic realm, to mention but a few types of data, Ludwig provides annual tables of exports, imports, trade balances, and exchange rates from independence to 1978. He offers gross domestic product data for the postwar period, but does not include Claudio Haddad’s retrospective estimates for GDP back to 1900.
In sum, despite omissions that inevitably make such a work more useful to some scholars than others, Ludwig has compiled an excellent research tool for historians of modern Brazil. Graduate students of my generation often noted the need for such a book; now it exists.
