Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

Study of the industrial development of the iron and steel industry in Brazil - discusses the historical background of the economic structure, the use of technology in and the cost of steel industrial production, the availability of natural resources, the efficiency of the choice of the location of industry and forecasts the future patterns of supply of and demand for Brazilian steel in the world market. Bibliography pp. 183 to 186, map and statistical tables.

Brazil's Steel City presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, Dinius shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. Dinius argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in Eastern India presents an analysis of class formation in the industrial town, Rourkela in the eastern Indian state Odisha, and the ways this process relates to regional ethnicity and caste. This study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the 2000s and oral histories covering the period from the inception of the steel plant, and it focusses on the region’s ‘tribes’, indigenous people or Adivasis who lost their land when the Government of India established a large steel plant in Rourkela in the 1950s. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, historians interested in industrial labour and work, in class, caste, Adivasis, ethnicity and their dynamic entanglement, as well as students and activists. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

A study of class and inequality from an anthropological perspective, bringing together an international team of researchers.