German migration to Brazil in global perspective: trends & new directions

Abstract

This essay elaborates the historiographical reasons to take stock of German migration to Brazil in this bicentennial year: It examines how global and transnational history have broken new ground in our understanding of these two nations and their interconnection. It suggests comparisons and contrasts with larger geographic subfields. And it draws out the themes that historians of far different times and spaces may find familiar in the history of Germans in Brazil, from race and empire to class, confession, and commerce. Recent research confirms that Germans abroad were overwhelmingly “unbound” from the dramas of nationalist politics. Yet the story of “unbound” Germans must be understood in light of changing schemes for binding national communities together. The history of Germans in Brazil thus provides an illuminating vista onto the tripartite problematic of nation, market, and state at local, regional, national and global scales – a problematic central to new directions in global and transnational history generally.