Beyond its specific contributions to the historical field, this book responds to two major challenges of our present moment: 1) to recognize the contributions of Latin America and the “Global South” in intellectual history and 2) to reconsider theory and methodology in light of this. By resurfacing Brazil and Brazilian thinkers in the history of the social sciences, Terms of Exchange examines the flow of ideas from Brazil to Europe—ideas that were central to changing the way we think about the world economy, temporality, settler colonialism, and race relations to name just a few themes. In that sense, it is explicitly anti-Eurocentric. However, this is not a romantic story.The inequalities between intellectuals in Brazil and the North Atlantic were very real. Differences in research infrastructure, language, and cultural prestige affected how people and ideas circulated (or didn’t) and whether their contributions were recognized. Exchanges between Arthur Ramos and Sigmund Freud shed light on this. Ramos was a psychiatrist and early specialist of Afro-Brazilian culture. He wrote several times to Freud, sending copies of his books. Freud simply responded that he did not read Portuguese. Brazilians such as Ramos had to read and communicate in French, English, and sometimes German, but they could not expect their own work to be read outside of Brazil. This is not unique to intellectuals from Brazil or Latin America: throughout the Global South, thinkers that were prominent in their countries of origin were effectively subaltern at the international level.What makes this story so compelling, however, is that it complicates certain assumptions about rich and poor countries in terms of the practice of research. There is a great deal of literature that examines—and criticizes— how wealthy universities and private foundations have privileged the Global North and contributed to furthering inequalities. In this particular story, however, the birth of the modern social sciences is not some Rockefeller or Ford-funded project, but instead one that emerged in public universities in Brazil. Places like São Paulo decided to invest in the humanistic social sciences in the 1930s and 1940s, a period marked by the Great Depression and World War II. In so doing, they became important nodes in the development of innovative research in a wide range of disciplines.When I began researching this book, my idea was to write an intellectual and cultural history of Brazil. But even if I identify first and foremost as a historian of Brazil, my earlier training in French language and culture allowed me to see connections that had largely gone unexamined. When they did appear in preexisting literature, discussion of these connections rarely extended beyond Brazil’s borders—even less so in the English language. Great Latin American cities—like all great cities—are formed by and contribute to local, national, and international contexts. My specific background, I think, allowed me to offer a fresh take on well-trodden territory.