Jorge Amadoi¿½s i¿½Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamoni¿½ is a tale of different stories in the township if Ilhi¿½us, which is a province of the larger city of Bahai, situated in the northern Brazil. This is not a long novel, as epics go; but it is easy to place the details of the narrative: the political infighting, legal wrangles, unrequited love, romantic conquests, and the progress of women within the microcosm that was Ilhi¿½us in the early part of the twentieth century, against the back drop of the coming of capitalism and profiteering. This is also a microsm of the struggle of Latin America against the burgeoning hegemonies of the developed Western Hemisphere. (1) Despite the name of the novel, it is not only about Gabrielai¿½if indeed she is the heroine (for this novel has plenty of heroes and heroines).This essay will be written to describe the geographicali¿½cultural, political and economici¿½aspects that the novel. Ilhi¿½us is a microcosm for the third world development in Brazil, and, indeed, the rest of Latin America. The forces of capitalism take root. The drive to profits above all displaces and dispossesses people.
             Ilhi¿½us is not a big town. It is a mere province of one of the lesser known, but nonetheless growing cities of northern Brazili¿½Bahia. While the Ilhi¿½ans see Bahia as the center of their culture, the rest of the world might be more inclined to remember the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. But Bahia does provide the backdrop against which Ilhi¿½ians measure their progress. Ilhi¿½us was created by the removal of the virginal, Amazonian rainforests in order to make way for cacao plantations to meet the growing demand for chocolate in developed parts of the world. The quest for cacao and land that cultivated it and the greed for the revenue it might generate, much like the frontiersman during the long-defunct California Gold Rush, gave rise to i¿½Colonels.i¿½ These were so...