A little obscure but I’ve enjoyed reading about Brazil’s history. I’m having trouble finding out about the most important cause for the changes in this period. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
It there is any historic debates? Yes, I would say a lot. I mean, we have a vivid historiography here. And lots of Brazilian historians have being debate this issue throug decades. From the classic ones, like Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Boris Fausto to the new ones like Lilia Moritz Schwarcz the developmento of Brazilian history as a hole is a subject.
Theories are so vast and diverse that I even have some difficult to point you a properly approach. This is a really complex matter, and the changes itself cannot be explained by a only single reason, but rather must be interpreted through specific factors on their specific moment. Despite Brazil is not one of the poorest countries on the world, it never was also a highly industrialized superpower. Country have a strong regional influence, but highly depends on what the main global powers, defines as geopolitical and economic goals.
So, we can point that change from Monarchy to Republic was impulsioned by low economic rates and the power of landowners, who started to oppose government policies, and we can point that on 1930 this very same landowners was not that powerful as the rising industrial elites, or that on 1964 conservatives, supported by USA, took the power on a moment of rising inflation, or that on 1985 those same conservatives were unable to fight poverty, inflation and provide economic rising. All those sentences I mentioned are kind of common places on our history and have many more complex factors to explain it, but something that one have always to consider is that developing countries like Latin American ones changed their political systems many times due the way they are inserted on global economy since their independences.
What I can say is, despite the answer here is: yes there is a lot of debate, those debates are at the same time really vast and even vague, and Brazilian historioraphy, I think like most of the other ones, generally analyzes political changes by theirselfes, looking for reason who can be founded analyzing their specific historic moments rather than inserting it on a long duration tendency presuming that they are always changing. This is beacuse despite we can point those changes as a tendency, all of those was really different to the others.