Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality : Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912–1916

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oral history with detailed archival research, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality depicts a peasant community whose security in economic, social, and religious relations was suddenly disrupted by the intrusion of international capital. Diacon shows how a deadly triumvirate comprised to foreign capital, state power, and local bosses engineered a land tenure revolution that threatened smallholders subsistence, sparking rebellion among the Contestado peasants.Unlike most analysis of millenarian movements, Diacon combines a material analysis with a careful exploration of the movements millenarian ideology to demonstrate how a particular combination of external and internal forces produced a crisis of values in the Contestado society. Such a crisis, Diacon concludes, gave a special power to the millenarian vision that promised not only outward reform, but inner salvation as well. This work offers a significant contribution to the literature of millenarian movements, popular religion, peasant rebellions, and the transition to capitalism in Brazil.