‘This richly detailed analysis of the rise and fall of Brazil’s market reserve for informatics provides insights into both the art of policy making and the limits of protectionism. Combining archival research with interviews with key players, the text provides fascinating details and some provocative insights.’ - Melissa H. Birch, University of Kansas, USA‘"It’s time for us to compete with the big boys!" was a widespread sentiment in Brazil during the seventies and eighties, referring to IBM and other giant globalized informatics enterprises. And so Brazil gave it a try. Its bold and fascinating effort, perhaps the last major ISI project in Latin America, failed in the end. But Seward’s book – deeply researched, extremely well written, analytically rich – tells this important and instructive tale better and more comprehensively than any other work I know.At one level this is a case study. In social science graduate training today, rhetoric honors "multi-methods" but reality often treats case studies as inferior to big data, econometric techniques, formal theory, and formal experimental designs. This book reminds us how indispensable case studies are and how valuable a fine case study can be. At another level the book is informed by and explores theoretical literatures on state autonomy, regime change, varieties of capitalism and the causes and effects of these phenomena. It draws hypotheses from those literatures, tests them with the case study data, and generates new hypotheses from those data.Finally, in my opinion taken as a whole the book supports a growing trend among scholars to think of political leaders and institutions as critical variables for explaining successes and failures of development (economic, social, political). This may be an unintended feature of the book, which is not explicitly concerned about development very much, but it might be a result of it, and if so a very positive one.’ - Robert A. Packenham, Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Stanford University; Author of Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (1973, 1976, 2015) and The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (1992, 1998)
