This volume highlights factors that led to the onset of the U.S. presence within colonial Brazil's mercantilist economy and then the independent Brazilian empire's agricultural, scientific, religious and educational institutions.

The book examines the interaction of U.S. businessmen, explorers, scientists, immigrants, missionaries and educators with the dominant institutions of the Luso-Brazilian empires. Employing an institutionalist framework to describe the interplay between forces of change versus forces of inertia that conditioned the economic and sociocultural development of the two empires, the book explains how Portuguese and Brazilian technical innovators employed contacts with the United States for more than a century to attempt to alter Brazil's economy and society.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S.-Brazil relations and Latin American history more generally.