"An essential contribution for reflecting on what is at stake in academic exchange based on empirical research."

Brésil(s)

"What Merkel proposes is a subversion of what are seen as the traditional logics of intellectual history, an approach whose importance derives from the names involved. Even the most firmly established figures in Brazilian intellectual history, unanimously recognized in their country of origin as seminal in their respective areas of specialization, ultimately could not manage to escape erasure. That is the state of things that Terms of Exchange proposes to reverse."

Revista de História (São Paulo)

"Merkel revises not only a strictly colonial vision of the French presence, but also the forgetting (at times by the French authors themselves) of the importance of collaborations with Brazilian intellectuals. The latter were essential partners in the context of political liberalism, the effervescence of modernism, and the university renewal that was São Paulo in the 1930s."

Le Monde

“A rich examination of the intriguing crossings between Brazilian and French social sciences from the 1930s to the 1950s, Terms of Exchange offers the first history of the interactions among such characters as Roger Bastide, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arthur Ramos, Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Paul Rivet, Gilberto Freyre, and Fernand Braudel.”

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago

“This book reconsiders the intellectual itineraries of the French professors who came to São Paulo to found USP. Challenging traditional geographies of knowledge, Merkel situates the Brazilian experience of social scientists such as Braudel and Lévi-Strauss at the center of important epistemological inflections of the mid-twentieth century.”

Gabriela Pellegrino Soares, University of São Paulo

“Merkel explores with brio a little-known episode of transatlantic intellectual history: the prewar dialectics of exchange between a small group of not-yet-famous French visiting professors at the University of São Paulo and their Brazilian hosts. The great merit of the book is to highlight the weight of their Brazilian experience on those who later deeply transformed the French social sciences.”

Philippe Descola, author of Beyond Nature and Culture

"Merkel's work is a welcome addition to both Brazilian history and to the charting of the twentieth-century social sciences."

The Latin Americanist

"Attempts to show the close relationship of Northern social sciences to Southern thinkers have been reduced in scope and impact so far. This is why the book Terms of Exchange by Ian Merkel is more than welcome."

Bulletin of Latin American Research

"Terms of Exchange is a relevant contribution to the history of the intellectuals and an important global history exercise that shows, through at least two superposed ‘mana circulation systems’, how entangled the relations among intellectuals from different parts of the world could be if well analyzed."

Storia della Storiografia

"It would be easy to mistake Terms of Exchange as being of value only to the narrow specialist. However, it is part of a broader project to bring the global South to the center of the cataclysmic events and ideas of the last five centuries. Whether it be the Enlightenment, modernity, or antiracism, Latin America has never been on the periphery of these movements, but among its vanguard."

Hispanic American Historical Review