The article proposes a novel approach to Brazil's history by radicalising environmental history's call for writing biophysical environments into the human past. We offer three independent narrative experiments centring nonhuman organisms and things and their power to shape human lives, institutions, and documents. Focusing on ants, mosquitoes, and plankton, these stories put Brazil's early modernity (1850–1950) into perspective, highlighting the immersion of humans in a wider world of agentic beings and things. Our approach emphasizes the uniqueness of individual experiences engendered by the randomness and contingency of a multitude of unexpected encounters with other-than-human entities. We conclude by tracing the broad outlines of a historical approach capable of narrating and explaining Brazil as a more-than-human political community.

这篇文章通过激化环境历史将生物物理环境写入人类历史的呼吁，提出了一种研究巴西历史的新方法。我们提供三个独立的叙事实验，以非人类生物体和事物及其塑造人类生活、制度和文件的力量为中心。这些故事聚焦于蚂蚁、蚊子和浮游生物，透视了巴西的早期现代性（1850-1950 年），强调了人类沉浸在更广阔的代理人和事物世界中。我们的方法强调个人经历的独特性，这些经历是由与非人类实体的大量意外遭遇的随机性和偶然性产生的。