Narratives
A narrative is one person's account of records already in the atlas. It walks in order from one event or link to the next, with a paragraph at each step that says why the step follows. The author signs it. A narrative changes nothing it walks through. The events, links, dates and confidence levels stay as the records have them, even when two narratives disagree.
This page groups narratives by the centuries they cross, so two accounts of the same years sit side by side. That is the purpose of narratives. Where two disagree about what mattered, both stay, and the reader compares them. A narrative that crosses from one century into the next appears under both.
Click a title to open the narrative in the atlas at its first step. The map, the graph and the timeline then follow the walk. Leaving the narrative puts the atlas back where it was.
2 narratives, grouped by the centuries they cross. A narrative that crosses two centuries appears under both. Each title opens the narrative at its first step.
The 16th century 1
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
The 17th century 1
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
The 18th century 1
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
The 19th century 1
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
The 20th century 2
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
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How the colonial war ended the regime
A walk from the first shots in Angola in 1961 to the end of the revolutionary period in November 1975, following one claim: that the Estado Novo was brought down by the war it refused to end, and that the war then went on setting the terms of what replaced it. It is one account among the possible ones — the weight it puts on the army against the weight others put on the economy, on the succession to Salazar or on the opposition inside Portugal is exactly what a second narrative would argue with.
The 21st century 1
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Who was buying
Brazil has been organised around exporting commodities since 1500, and the identity of the buyer kept changing — Portugal, then Britain, then the United States, now China. Each change was political. The walk follows four movements: sugar and gold for the crown that owned the coast; coffee and rubber under terms Britain wrote in 1810 and enforced in 1845; steel, oil and wartime latex traded to the United States for industrial capital, ending in a coup and twenty-one years of dictatorship; and iron ore, soya and oil sold to China since 2009. It is one account among the possible ones. The weight it puts on the buyer is exactly what a second narrative would argue with, and the disputed link at its centre — whether the United States moved against Goulart because of what Brazil produced or out of Cold War anti-communism — is where that argument is sharpest.
The atlas builds this list from the records. The period of a narrative comes from the years of the records it walks through. Nobody types it in. The records are under CC BY-SA 4.0.