James P. Woodard’s book expands the scope of the argument made by Victoria de Grazia in Irresistible Empire. Footnote ¹ Grazia’s book follows the United States’ “market empire” throughout the twentieth century to show how twentieth-century consumer culture made Europe “Europe.” Woodard’s book, Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce, offers a South American corollary. He argues that “the cultural work that went into the making of a national variant of U.S.-style consumer capitalism eventually helped define Brazil” (481). His argument challenges the work of Brian Owensby and Rafael Ioris, who both trace the birth of Brazilian consumer culture to the 1950s and early 1960s under President Juscelino Kubitschek. This was a moment when the local Brazilian company Walita claimed to be the world’s largest manufacturers of blenders; when Brazil began to domestically produce automobiles like the Aero Willys and Volkswagen Beetle; when Brazilians gained unprecedented access to television and radio sets that exposed them to programming on Rádio Nacional and TV-Excelsior; and when Brazilian supermarkets such as Disco, Sirva-se, and Peg-Pag sprung up in the wealthy neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. However, Woodard, whose book begins at the turn of the century and ends in the 1970s, tells a longer story of Brazilian engagement with consumer culture.

Woodard relies on an impressive number of primary sources and archives to make his argument. Records at the National Archive’s Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce document the arrival in Brazil of Ford Motors in 1920 and General Motors in 1925. These two American companies each set up assembly plants for their imported cars in the São Paulo area, and by the end of the 1920s they had established networks of dealerships throughout the country. Additionally, these two companies supplemented their assembly operations with sales, advertising, and publicity teams to sell their automobiles. In 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company arrived in Brazil to assist with General Motors’ advertising. Woodard relies on the J. Walter Thompson Company archives, held in the Hartman Center at Duke University, in North Carolina, to document the firm’s influence in Brazil. In 1929 the company undertook one of the earliest local investigations of demographic data and consumer preferences, the results of which divided Brazilians into classes A, B, C, and D. This study proved enormously consequential as Brazilians still use—and think of themselves in—these terms in the twenty-first century. Woodard also quotes memoirs written by some of Brazil’s most prominent leaders in advertising, broadcasting, and retailing. Several of these individuals received their training at Rádio Tupi or TV-Globo, Brazil’s leading broadcasting centers between the 1930s and 1960s. Other leaders created department stores such as A Exposição in the 1940s that emulated American department stores such Macy’s and Marshall Fields. In all these examples, these individuals recall the influence they took from the United States. Woodard’s citation of Renato Castelo Branco, who worked at the advertising firm N. W. Ayer before becoming the vice president of J. Walter Thompson in 1965, best encapsulates Brazilians’ relationship with U.S. commercial culture: “All of us, professionals and advertisers, were seized by the fascination of American technique” (314).

Given the strength of Woodard’s primary and secondary source materials, nothing suggests that his argument falls short. Indeed, he makes a strong case for “Brazil’s American century,” which influenced everything from how Brazilians celebrated carnival and Christmas to how they consumed soft drinks (23). Scholars can nevertheless build on Woodard’s argument by focusing on the influence of Brazilian commerce on U.S. culture. Woodard, for instance, discusses the influence of Assis Chateaubriand’s media empire, Díarios e Emissoras Associados. Throughout the interwar years, Chateaubriand’s magazines, including O Cruzeiro, published advertisements for General Electric, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Standard Oil. In 1935 Chateaubriand created Rádio Tupi, and in 1950 he founded TV-Tupi. Woodard includes writings from O Observador Econômico e Financeiro in 1946, in which Armando d’Almeida, founder of an early Brazilian-owned ad agency, claimed that Díarios e Emissoras Associados was “the organization that instilled confidence in the advertising business among us” (92). Yet scholars might be encouraged to think of the influence of companies such as Díarios e Emissoras Associados on American consumer life as well. In late 1962, Chateaubriand’s company was a sponsor of flights to New York City so that Brazilian musicians, including Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, as well as several others, could perform a new style of music called bossa nova at Carnegie Hall. This famous and influential concert helped spark a bossa nova craze and led to the creation of an entire American music industry devoted to the recording, promotion, and sales of bossa nova music in the mid-1960s. By building on Grazia’s Irresistible Empire, and specifically by relying on Woodard’s Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce, future scholars may be encouraged to find moments when Brazil’s “market empire” made Americans “Americans” and maybe even offered evidence of “America’s Brazilian century.”