Böcker av Jeffrey D. Needell

This book, originally published in 1987, is a socio-cultural analysis of a tropical belle epoque: Rio de Janeiro between 1898 and 1914. It relates how the city's elite evolved from the semi-rural, slave-owning patriarchy of the coffee-port seat of a monarchy into an urbane, professional, rentier upper crust dominating the centre of a 'modernising' oligarchical republic.

This study focuses on the Brazilian Empire's Conservative Party and its success and failure in constructing a representative, constitutional monarchy to defend a slaveholding plantation society.