Ampliando o Estado Imperial

Os engenheiros e a organização da cultura no Brasil oitocentista

Abstract

In the Brazilian social development, at the end of the 19th century, the conflicting correlation of forces that sustained the block in the power started to show loss in the capability of intellectual formulations adequate to articulate reforms compatible with the historical moment. Absence of slave workforce could be envisaged and the sectors of the prevailing class fed concern over disrupting the structure of the economic model that had favored them for centuries. Since the 1870’s, technical / scientific intellectual engineers, graduated by the Escola Politécnica, associated with the imperial-slaving historical block, has been qualified for professional activities related with huge public works and other interventions in benefit of the commercialization of primary export products. In general lines, engineers, primarily unionists, at the Instituto Politécnico Brasileiro and subsequently, at the Clube de Engenharia, started to act as technicians and leaders at the Railroad Station Companies, whose particular role, at that time, was connected with the interests of the fractions of the agro-exporting complex of certain regions in the country. In this study, we will attempt to consider the organicism of these engineers “with a diploma” in the corporate behavior of these companies, within which the agents in question gathered capital, acted in the planning and performance of technical projects, as well as in the ideological conceptions of the constructions. Thus, we believe it to be possible to explain how the projects related with the railways that were conceived within the Club unfolded so as to extrapolate civil society toward political society, thus disclosing a portion of an expansion process of the Brazilian State.