Brazil's largest companies, at the height of his fortune.
His personal wealth, larger than the imperial budget by 1867.
By which he missed seeing the monarchy that ruined him fall.
The New York Times called him the Rothschild of the South American continent. Brazil called him a threat, and broke him.
He was born on the cattle frontier in 1813, into a Brazil of slaves and sugar with no railways, no telegraph, no industry, and no future anyone could see. He rose from shop clerk to the richest man in the empire, and spent fifty years trying to drag his country into the modern world: the first railroad, the first gaslit streets, shipyards, banks, the submarine cable to Europe.
The institutions he served could use everything he built and still would not keep the man who built it. In 1878 they let him fall, and the fall was not an accident. It was a choice, made by the country that owed him most.
This is the story of that man, and of what his rise and ruin reveal about how nations misjudge their own worth.
Brazil has always been priced by the world on its politics, when its lasting value was written in its physics: its land, its water, its energy, its minerals. Mauá is the defining case of that mistake.
A biography, a tragedy, and an argument about how the future actually arrives.
Drew Crawford is the Managing Partner of Austral Continental, a cross-border capital advisory firm connecting United States institutional and family-office capital to Brazilian hard assets. He has spent more than a decade on the ground across Brazil, in more than fourteen states and forty cities, working at the intersection of international capital and the country's physical asset base. The Man Who Brought the Future is his first book.