Silvio Romero’s Brazil: an Approach to the Brazilian Population of the 19th Century

Abstract

With this article I intend to explore the way in which Silvio Romeroone of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of the end of the century-approached and thereby interpreted Brazilian population and the country itself. The author build a theory of Brazil , or a system of interpretation, where he seeked to balance, on the one hand the defense of modernization and the westernization of the country, and on the other hand to assume a visible nationalistic approach to the point of defending the miscegenation inherited by the colonial period despite his scientific and racial convictions. Under such apparently contradictory political horizons- westernization and nationalism- the author's approach deals with questions such as the presence of African descendents, miscegenation and European migration in Brazil.