Marshall Eakin

Marshall Eakin is a historian of Latin America specializing in the history of Brazil. Although his work spans all of Brazilian history, his major publications have concentrated on the processes of nationalism and nation-building, economic and business history, and industrialization—primarily in the twentieth century.

His first book, British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 (Duke, 1989), traces the history of the most successful foreign enterprise in 19th- and 20th-century Brazil. Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Palgrave, 2001) examines the industrialization of the second-largest industrial center in Brazil.

Much of his work addresses audiences beyond the academy. This work includes Brazil: The Once and Future Country (St. Martin’s, 1997), a one-volume introduction to Brazil for beginners and two video courses with the Great Courses, The Conquest of the Americas and The Americas in a Revolutionary Era. His more recent book is The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Eakin’s latest book project is “Becoming Brazilians: Race and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil” to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.