Empire by emulation: Brazilian business elites encounter the U.S. department store

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of Brazilian businessmen in recreating aspects of the culture of U.S.-style consumer capitalism in their own country, especially through their emulation of the North American department store. Rather than an imposition from without, the reshaping of Brazilian retailing practice and culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century was largely the work of native-born Brazilian elites, some of whom were hugely successful, and whose success was part of a larger remaking of modern Brazil.