ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK BEGAN AS A DISSERTATION AND RESEARCH FOR THAT DISSERTATION BEGAN at The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, in the Summer of 1994. Along with generously providing funding to do so, the library also furnished a forum where I first formally shared ideas about this project. Funding for research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was provided by the Comissão Fulbright, Brasilia, and funding for additional research in Lisbon, Portugal was provided by the Joint Committee on Western Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council with funds from the Luso-American Development Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge the generous assistance provided by the archivists and librarians at the various institutions in the United States, Portugal, and Brazil where I conducted research: in the United States, The John Carter Brown Library, The New York Public Library, and the Interlibrary Loan Office at Bobst Library, New York University; in Portugal, the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisboa; in Rio de Janeiro, the Arquivo Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Arquivo Histórico Itamaraty. In particular, the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Divisions at the Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro did their best to ensure access to their collections at a time when building maintenance and reforms meant that the conditions for attending to researchers were far from ideal. At the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro Satiro Nunes always enthusiastically shared his understanding of the intricacies of the archive’s early nineteenth-century collections. In São Paulo, I would like to thank José Mindlin for allowing me access to the Biblioteca José Mindlin, and Cristina An-tunes for making research there truly a pleasure. The Biblioteca includes not only the invaluable collection of José Mindlin, but also the extensive holdings from Rio de Janeiro’s Royal Press collected and studied by the late Rubens Borba de Moraes.
My research would not have been possible without the guidance and encouragement I received before I reached the archives. Barbara Weinstein, Ronnie Hsia, Maria Ligia Prado, Kenneth Maxwell, Nelson Schapochnik, Jeffrey Needell, Thomas Cohen, Richard Graham, David Higgs, and Roderick Barman generously provided comments on initial outlines for this project and made suggestions about sources, related scholarship, and Brazilian archives. Professor Barman’s support was particularly encouraging, as it was after reading his work that I first began to consider the questions raised by the transfer of the court. Above all, however, it was Warren Dean’s supportive criticism during the various stages of defining a dissertation topic that helped me to find a more analytical focus for the numerous questions about the transfer of the court that initially surfaced. Warren is not here to see the results in published form. His tragic death in 1994 was an insurmountable loss for his family and friends and for scholars of Brazil. For me it was both a personal loss and, as a graduate student, a loss that left me in a difficult position professionally. I would not have persevered in the endeavor of graduate school or research for this project had it not been for the support I subsequently received. Antonio Feros, Ronnie Hsia, Maria Ligia Prado, and Barbara Weinstein all went beyond the call of duty, beyond the boundaries of their own institutions in some cases, and beyond their fields of expertise in others, providing examples of the kind of collegiality that sustained Warren’s own faith in academic life.
In Rio de Janeiro, Gladys Sabina Ribeiro pointed me in the direction of a collection of documents at the National Archive that became crucial sources for this book. Alessandra Silveira, Tania Salgado Pimenta, and Brodwyn Fischer made the most excellent research companions both in the archive and during debriefing sessions on the calçadão. Back in New York, funding for writing was provided by the Warren Dean Fellowship, Department of History, New York University—a fellowship created with the support of Elizabeth Dean—and by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, NYU, and the American Association of University Women. The Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University provided me with the resources and the time to do additional research and writing. While writing various drafts of this book, I benefitted from the comments and criticism of Antonio Feros, Ada Ferrer, Ronnie Hsia, and Barbara Weinstein; from Teresa Meade’s careful reading of my dissertation; from Bonnie Wasserman’s help with language and orthography and Mary Steiber’s assistance with an important classical reference; and from the encouragement from and exchange of ideas and sources with Pedro Cardim, António Manuel Hespanha, Jurandir Malerba, David Higgs, Fátima Gouvêa, and Iara Lis Carvalho e Souza. Iara’s recent Pátria Coroada has undoubtedly enriched my understanding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brazilian political culture.
At various stages of writing this book I also benefitted greatly from those who commented on presentations of parts of this project in a number of venues, including The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the College of Charleston, South Carolina; the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University; the Graduate Student History Workshop and the Atlantic History Workshop, New York University; the Conference on Latin American History; the Columbia University Brazil Seminar; the Latin American Studies Association Conference; and the Society of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Annual Conference; and especially Timothy Anna and A.J.R. Russell-Wood. I thank as well those who reviewed parts or all of this work for the Luso-Brazilian Review and Routledge, especially Neill Macaulay. Portions of this work appeared as “Royal Authority, Empire and the Critique of Colonialism: Political Discourse in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821,” Luso-Brazilian Review 37(2) (2000), and I thank the University of Wisconsin Press for granting permission to include that material here. I also thank Brendan O’Malley at Routledge for sharing both his enthusiasm and expertise.
Of course, I would have never completed this project without the support of family and friends. I thank Louis Anthes, Duane Corpis, Alejandro Cañeque, Julia Miller, Alejandra Osorio, and Daniella Santos for their collegiality, for reading drafts and listening to presentations and sharing their insights and skepticism, for their friendship, and for their sense of humor about academic life. Trudy Levy has, on a number of occasions, provided her characteristic optimistic encouragement when my own enthusiasm was on the wane. Jehan, Mahdi, Neveen, and Shrouk Abedrabbo; Summer, Sammer, and Reem Mustafa; and Suher and Dena Alsurakhi, perhaps more than anyone else besides myself, have had the most constant and immediate contact with this project, as drafts became scratch paper that they then transformed with their creativity and penchant for writing and drawing pictures. The constant support of my parents, John and Nancy Schultz, and of Erick Schultz and Julie Caspersen Schultz, in turn, has taken many, many forms, including travel to far away places, making it easier for me to be away from home. No one, however, has so intensely shared with me both the burdens and rewards of writing this book more than my husband, Nasir Abdellatif. Some time ago, he opened his life to both me and my pursuit of writing this book and the book and I are better for it.
A NOTE ON PORTUGUESE ORTHOGRAPHY
José Joaquina Lopes de Lima, the author of a sardonic Portuguese political lexicon entitled Diccionario Carcundatico (1821) and its Supplemento (1821), defined orthography as the “only matter in which Portugal had an ample liberty to write.” Early nineteenth-century Portuguese-language writers and printers indeed used a broad range of orthographic practices. Although there have been efforts to effect global standards for written Portuguese, publishers in Portugal and Brazil often follow distinct conventions. Here I have attempted to standardize the orthography of manuscript sources. I have transcribed printed sources as they were published and as they have been cited by other scholars, preserving the range of conventions used in Brazil and Portugal throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, in spite of Lima’s droll admonishment, orthographic inconsistencies remain.
ABBREVIATIONS
ABN, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
AHI, Arquivo Histórico Itamaraty, Rio de Janeiro
AHU, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon
ANRJ, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
BNRJ Ms., Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Seção de Manuscritos
DHI, Documentos para a história da independência v. 1. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1923
RHI, Revista de História das Idéias, Coimbra
RIHGB, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro
IN NOVEMBER 1807, WITH A NAPOLEONIC ARMY AT THEIR HEELS, THE PORTUGUESE prince regent Dom João and thousands of courtiers and functionaries left behind their “beloved motherland” and set sail for Brazil.1 For the next thirteen years Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s viceregal capital, replaced Lisbon as the center of the Portuguese world. Such events were unprecedented in the history of European empires. Never before had a European ruler visited, let alone taken up residence in, a colony. Longstanding political, cultural, and economic hierarchies of empire were dramatically challenged. Indeed, as Brazilian historian José Honório Rodrigues explained, the transfer of the court “denaturalized” Brazil’s colonial status2 and, consequently, what contemporaries called the “old colonial system” appeared to come to an end. Yet, it was not only the empire and the old colonial system that were at stake in the transfer of the court. The expansion of Europe and, more specifically, what had come to be called the Portuguese empire, were inseparable from the institution of monarchy. The monarchy embodied the laws and loyalties that joined all of its disparate “conquests” and, as a consequence, the monarch himself, or herself, was identified as constituting a political center. While the monarchy thus could account for the possibility of moving the royal court—because the monarch transcended all of the parts of his dominion, Portuguese memorialists explained, he could reside in any one of them—by momentarily decentering the monarch and by casting doubt on whether he could protect his dominions, such a move also called into question the legitimacy of Portuguese royal authority itself. This book examines the ways in which contemporaries in the new royal court of Rio de Janeiro defined in political discourse and practice the meaning of these events and responded to the challenges that they posed.
To frame this inquiry into the politics of monarchy and empire in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, I have borrowed the image of a “tropical Versailles” as a metaphorical point of departure. Brazilian historian Manuel de Oliveira Lima first used this phrase to describe Dom João’s New World residence in his now classic account of the transfer of the court, Dom João VI no Brasil.3 His generous comparison between the Sun King’s palace and the Portuguese prince regent’s Quinta da Boa Vista conjured up the splendor and magnificence that the presence of the royal court supposedly bestowed on the former colonial capital. Here, however, I have approached this image differently, as an evocation of both the larger political-cultural context in which these events unfolded and the contradictions that resulted from the encounter of an exiled sovereign with his vassals in the New World. Thus, on the one hand, the image of a “tropical Versailles” raises the question of the relationship between political power and representation. Versailles, after all, stands as a symbol of the grand effort to define Louis XIV’s reign: to ritualize both extraordinary and quotidian events in the king’s life and to assert persuasively and spectacularly an image of royal authority that was at once absolute, fearsome, magnanimous, and accessible.4 From the perspective of the turn of the nineteenth century, Versailles also recalls a monarchical past torn asunder by a revolution that challenged both certain representations of political leadership and sovereignty, as well as the nature of representation itself.5 In the wake of the transfer of the court, royal officials and residents in Rio de Janeiro too recognized the relationship between power and spectacle and grappled with the turn-of-the-century crisis in representation, reasserting the image of a virtuous and powerful sovereign and a unified empire, both of which were jeopardized by the retreat from Lisbon, in their efforts to transform the city into a royal court and capital of a new American empire.
On the other hand, such a transformation was shaped by certain realities that Oliveira Lima summed up euphemistically with the adjective “tropical”: cultural and color differences and the institution of slavery. While Oliveira Lima imagined that the “exotic” nature of his New World residence enchanted Prince Regent Dom João, contemporaries repeatedly expressed concerns about the “colonial” obstacles to “civilization” and Europeanization in the New World, processes that, they argued, the transfer of the court both depended upon and ensured. Their ensuing efforts to eradicate the vestiges of a colonial past were, however, shaped and limited by the crown’s commitment to the colonialism of slavery in the imperial present. As a tropical Versailles, Rio de Janeiro thus would be a place where the hierarchy of sovereign and vassal, threatened, vindicated, and then redefined, met the persistent and violent hierarchy of owner and slave.
MONARCHY AND EMPIRE IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION
While the transfer of the court to Rio de Janeiro was unique, it was both part of and a particular response to an age of revolution. The North American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and the movements for independence in Spanish America together challenged the principles and practices of hereditary rule as well as hierarchies of status, color, and culture, involuntary servitude, and the subordinate place of America within European empire.6 For early nineteenth-century Portuguese royal officials, while all of these developments threatened their own old and imperial regime, the French Revolution and its apparent propensity to influence and inspire had proven to be the most calamitous. As revolutionaries in Paris assembled to dismantle an absolute monarchy that Portuguese kings and statesmen so admired, African and African-Caribbean slaves and people of color in the French colony of Saint Domingue seized the revolution as an opportunity to rebel against and then effectively destroy both French colonial rule and the institution of slavery, providing, as owners came to dread, an example for slaves in Brazil. Back in France, the National Assembly, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Directory then gave way to the rise of Napoleon and his own imperial ambitions for Spain and Portugal that led to the transfer of the court itself. In spite of efforts in the 1790s to isolate the dominions of the Portuguese sovereign from the consequences of revolution and what royal minister Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho characterized as the “French Nation’s” embrace of “excesses” and “absurdities,” with the French invasion of Portugal the profound impact of these consequences in the Portuguese empire could no longer be denied.
As these excesses appeared to have produced the conditions that eventually demanded the prince regent’s departure from Europe in 1807, they also greatly influenced how contemporaries in Brazil and Portugal defined the meaning of the transfer of the court. Although Portuguese royal officials, memorialists, and chroniclers obsessively and equivocally decried the Revolution and its extensive and devastating effects as the results of treachery, immorality, impiety, and “philosophy,” they also sought to provide systematic and circumspect responses that would at once defend the institution of monarchy and account for the new demands of the revolutionary conjuncture they experienced.7 Indeed, the “political exigencies and public discourse generated by the French Revolution,” as Marilyn Morris has argued of Britain, “helped lay the foundations for the … monarchy’s character and ideology of justification” in the years that followed.8 In the process, conservative, counterrevolutionary attempts to efface the possibility of change were transformed by a response to revolution that itself appeared to be revolutionary. For if a New World empire had been envisioned by a number of imperial officials, the transfer of the court was nevertheless, like the French Revolution, unprecedented and likewise identified by contemporaries as defying conventional politics and modes of expression. As José Acúrsio das Neves, the first Portuguese historian of the Peninsular War, argued, the “extraordinary” nature of the prince regent’s departure from Lisbon made objective analysis difficult and rendered the “simple style” of historical writing inadequate. “Who,” he asked, “could separate [the actual events] from the colorful pathos that characterized them?”9 In the 1810s the task for Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic then became to overcome this crisis of politics and its representation by discerning the meaning of these changes and the opportunities they presented.
Indeed, there were Portuguese in both Portugal and Brazil who came to see the transfer of the court itself as an event that paradoxically promised what one observer defined as “the greatest of all revolutions of the general political system” in defense of both monarchy and empire.10 Accordingly, they sought to articulate an ideology of justification, to use Morris’ term, that accounted for this predicament. In other words, they recognized that as both part of and a particular response to a larger rapidly changing context in which both the bases for political legitimacy and the intersecting histories of Europe and America were redefined, the prince regent’s move to Brazil required a politics that both could subsume the divisions created by geography, history, and culture that had proved to be such fertile ground for insurgency elsewhere and reinterpret the categories of the metropolitan and the colonial once the hierarchical structure they had sought to describe was foregone; a politics that could, as well, reassert both royal authority and the unity of vassalage throughout the monarchy’s dominions.
For some vassals and servants of the Portuguese crown this politics was one that privileged a renewal of the political old regime and its traditions. The monarchy, it seemed, was destined to be American because America was destined to provide the monarchy with the defeat of corruption and the triumph of absolutism and political virtue that Europe no longer could. Thus, in writing memórias and in negotiating the scope of royal patronage in the new royal court, exiles and long-standing residents in Rio de Janeiro both affirmed the undivided authority of the monarch and envisioned the transformation of what one courtier called a “vast but yet uncultivated continent”11 into a powerful bulwark against threats to the Portuguese crown’s independence.
There were, however, also Portuguese in Europe and America who saw in the transfer of the court an opportunity to embrace the very “ideas of the century” that elsewhere had challenged the established hierarchies on which the monarchy and empire were based. On the one hand, these ideas also allowed for a reinvention of tradition. Thus, the destruction of the old colonial system of mercantilist monopoly in favor of free trade that followed the prince regent’s arrival at Brazil was not the end of the empire, but rather a return to the more just and lucrative imperial enterprise celebrated in sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicles. On the other hand, the “ideas of the century” inspired efforts to achieve more fundamental change. Indeed, by the end of the decade, in response to the political and imperial crisis produced by the transfer of the court, the ancient institution of the Cortes had been reinvented in the name of national sovereignty and representative government. Although the defenders of what contemporaries referred to as both a “regeneration” and a “revolution” sought the “salvation” of monarchy, they also recognized the principles of equality and liberty and the authority of pátria. Thus, as Dom João’s reign in Brazil came to an end, the politics of representative government and national citizenship displaced the politics of absolute monarchy and vassalage. These early articulations of liberalism were fraught with contradictions, particularly in the ways in which contemporaries both identified empire and slavery as violations of the universal principles of liberty and equality and then posited differentiated and increasingly racialized understandings of their consequences. Indeed, as products and parts of an age of revolution, the transfer of the court and the ways in which its meaning was defined also harbored and imparted that age’s ambivalence.12
THE LOCAL POLITICS OF A NEW IMPERIAL CAPITAL
In spite of its dramatic and remarkable nature, and its place within the history of the old regime’s demise, the politics and political culture of the transfer of the court have not been the subject of systematic or detailed analysis. Indeed, Oliveira Lima’s Dom João VI was written almost a century ago. As the most comprehensive history of the Portuguese court in Rio, however, Lima’s work has also been most influential. Following Lima, subsequent narratives of Brazil’s national history have contended that the arrival of the prince regent was the beginning of the larger process of Brazilian independence. In making independence a foregone conclusion, the presence of the court in Rio then determined its conservative result: the creation of an empire and a nation under the aegis of the Portuguese monarchy itself.13 In other words, the meaning of the transfer of the court has been summed up as the answer to the questions of why Brazil became independent, and why, more specifically, nineteenth-century Brazil was not a republic, as were the other newly independent states in the Americas. Thus, the remarkable nature of the transfer of the court also explains the remarkable absence of scholarly inquiry into its history. For a sui generis event, it is assumed, simply produced sui generis results.14
More recent scholarship of nineteenth-century politics has both challenged this unequivocally nationalist narrative and sought to avoid the often teleological linkage between the eighteenth century and independent empire as well as the limits of the continuity-rather-than-change paradigm by examining the contradictory reconfigurations of power in both Portugal and Brazil. In exploring contemporary manifestations of and answers to “the national question” on both sides of the Portuguese Atlantic, the work of Roderick Barman, Iara Lis Carvalho Souza, and Valentim Alexandre reveals a process of independence that while undoubtedly linked to the experience of the transfer of the court, was neither transparent nor inevitable. There was, as Carvalho Souza explains, no relation of cause and effect.15 Nor, as José Murilo de Carvalho has asserted, did “the presence of the Portuguese court in Rio … make a monarchy a necessary outcome in Brazil.”16 The monarchy, like independence itself, as Murilo sustains, was an “option.” This book contributes to an understanding of such an option by examining how local politics and political culture in Rio de Janeiro were shaped by, diverged from, and then reshaped imperial, transatlantic, and transregional agendas during Dom João’s Brazilian reign. Its aim, however, is not to explain why an independent Brazil retained not only the institution of monarchy but also the same dynasty that had governed it as a colony since the seventeenth century, but rather to suggest a more complex answer to the question of how Brazil became a monarchy and an empire.
Restating this question more broadly, how was the exercise of power rendered legitimate or illegitimate to those both within and beyond officialdom in the wake of the transfer of the court? In conceptual terms answering this question has meant going beyond a narrow model of power emanating exclusively from the state to consider what Lynn Hunt has described as “the values, expectations and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions.” Thus, whereas Barman and Alexandre analyze political culture as it was articulated in official discourse and policy, I have approached the political culture of early nineteenth-century Rio in the various ways in which the dimensions of power and the grounds for legitimacy were expressed, and in which sovereignty, monarchy, and empire were understood, in a multiplicity of sites within the city. This political culture of the transfer of the court “did not just reflect social and political reality,” but rather emerged out of contemporaries’ efforts to transform that reality, a process in which officials, exiles, and longstanding residents self-consciously elaborated certain visions and practices of empire and monarchy, rebuilt a political framework that appeared to be crumbling before their eyes, and proposed alternative frameworks. This does not mean, however, that the political displaces the economic, social, and material “as the most global instance of the organization of society” in the history of early nineteenth-century Rio. While politics and political culture have their own logic or, as Hunt suggests in her work, textuality, they do not exist in a realm separate from society, culture, and economy. Thus, the history of the politics and political culture of the transfer of the court is also the history of the ways in which changing social and economic as well as political realities were rendered meaningful, within both new and old discourses, institutions, and practices.17
In practical terms, writing this history has meant reading official sources (correspondence and policy statements) in conjunction with sources that have not traditionally informed Brazilian political history. I examine, for example, police records, personal correspondence, sermons, theater, literature, travel memoirs, and iconography, some of which have been used to write comprehensive social and cultural histories of marriage, kinship, and slavery, of women and people of color, which both expose the contours of economic, social, and cultural structures (slavery and patriarchy) and explore resistence to these structures.18 Here I have sought to examine further the understandings of public authority and legitimacy that these sources posit. Thus, while I consider policing as a larger process of social control, I have also analyzed the specific ways in which it was used to define the relationship between sovereign and vassal and the boundaries of political community. The process of reconstructing the royal court that emerges from the intendancy sources is a contested one, the product of royal administration and the police intendant’s pronouncements and interventions, as well as alternative understandings of political legitimacy expressed in private and in public, in the relationships between slaves and owners, wives and husbands, sons and fathers, and among neighbors.
Such an examination of policing, as recorded in daily logbooks, correspondence, and more thorough and formal inquiries, also suggests that the city’s elites and popular classes experienced politics in ways that not only diverged but also formed common ground. Thus, this book proposes the possibility of a shared, local political culture formed within the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1810s, suggesting an alternative to the understanding of the politics of the transfer of the court and independence, presented by both Oliveira Lima and his critics, as the product of elite aspirations and agendas alone.19 Although the intendant claimed to represent an official, elite politics, both elites and the popular classes experienced, and at times resisted, his scrutiny and interventions. Within the city of Rio, the immediate presence of the monarch also formed a common ground upon which residents advanced their agendas and claimed their “rights” as vassals, calling on the crown to provide opportunities for royal service and then reward that service, as well as to resolve disputes. Indeed, although formally denied these rights, slaves exploited their new proximity to the king to seek manumission and to redefine their particular relations with their owners. Thus, although royal officials sought to prescribe how all of the city’s residents experienced politics, their interventions were only part of a political culture that encompassed both common and divergent understandings of the implications of sovereignty, alliances and divisions, different ways of understanding the consequences of these alliances and divisions, as well as attempts to efface them, all variously expressed in discourse and practice. In this sense, what the city’s residents shared was not one single understanding of authority and legitimacy, but rather the opportunity to exploit the tension between the professedly universal character of empire, sovereignty, and vassalage and the recognizable hierarchies created within them.20
This history of the politics and the political culture of the transfer of the court begins before the prince regent left Portugal for Brazilian shores. In Chapter 1, I examine representations of monarchy and empire in early modern Portugal and, more specifically, how America became central to an evolving ideal of imperial renewal. The decision to transfer the court, made in the midst of an immediate, and seemingly chaotic, diplomatic crisis, was predicated on a vision of Brazil’s potential that had been brought into sharper focus in the eighteenth century in the context of both European rivalry and the profitability of Brazilian resources. Chapter 2, in turn, introduces the dimensions of empire and monarchy in the local context of the city of Rio de Janeiro. By the end of the eighteenth century, residents and colonial officials both beheld the rewards of economic prosperity and of their political preeminence within Portuguese America and contended with the consequences of the city’s integration into an Atlantic world that was increasingly and “dangerously” revolutionary.
Metropolitan and viceregal efforts to isolate Rio and its residents from the effects of revolution ended with the arrival of the exiled royal court. The ways in which contemporaries sought to overcome this crisis and to account for the royal court’s move to the New World and the war it left behind are examined in Chapter 3. In Rio de Janeiro, within a rapidly expanding culture of print, the city’s residents and the newly arrived royal servants read pamphlets published by a new Royal Press, listened to sermons, and attended theatrical performances that sought to define the meaning of recent events as well as the future of monarchy, empire, and the Portuguese nation. In the context of the Peninsular War, Portugal remained a primary point of reference and the New World court was seen as enabling Portugal’s political regeneration and “national” renewal. As the war came to an end, however, the status of Portugal and of a heroic royal exile were redefined and the future of an imperial monarchy appeared to be American.
In transforming Rio de Janeiro into the royal residence and the capital of the empire, royal officials sought to make manifest this “new order of things” in the New World. Chapter 4 examines the remaking of the city as “the court.” In the 1810s Rio’s infrastructure was greatly expanded to include new aristocratic neighborhoods, a royal theater, printing press, and academies. The crown established a new general intendancy of the police to ensure social order and political allegiance and to “civilize” the city’s built environment and its residents. The re-creation of the Portuguese court in America also demanded the exhibition and the reaffirmation of the sovereign’s authority and of the nature of the political community over which he presided. Chapter 5 examines the politics of monarchy in Rio de Janeiro, how certain political discourses and practices sought to define sovereignty and vassalage, and the alternative definitions offered by the city’s residents. Although this reconstruction of the royal court meant that, as Maria Odila Silva Dias has argued, Brazil “interiorized” the metropolis,21 the imperatives of the colony, particularly manifest in the maintenance of the institution of slavery, remained. Indeed, although officials in Rio de Janeiro reflected upon a local and international critique of slavery, negotiated British efforts to end the trade in the Atlantic, and envisioned a brighter and “whiter” future without slaves, they nevertheless fostered an intense dependence on slavery in the new royal court and the surrounding region. Thus, both Chapters 4 and 5 also examine how royal officials and residents of the city sought to reconcile a colonial past and present with an imperial future as the city became the court, and how the quest to Europeanize and eradicate differences between the metropolitan and the colonial both redefined and reaffirmed existing social, cultural, racial, and political hierarchies.
On a larger scale, Rio de Janeiro’s new status as the court and Brazil’s new status as “metropolis” demanded a reconfiguration of the empire. Chapter 6 explores the ways in which the boundaries and ideals of the Portuguese empire were redefined in the 1810s. The creation of a “United Kingdom” offered a conservative vision of the new American empire. Yet, this empire was also marked by a longer process in which, as Anthony Padgen has argued for the eighteenth-century Spanish empire, imperial statesmen had begun to privilege an enlightened “calculation of benefits” over providentialism in defining an imperial ethos.22 Called on to account for both a glorious history of Portuguese trade and a future of commerce embodied by the British, the discourse of political economy suggested new ways of imagining political and imperial unity and the prospects for prosperity. Within an empire of open ports, Rio’s residents then used political economy and the new principles of empire to defend local interests and sovereignties undercut by new imperial practices.
The remaking of the Portuguese empire in the New World and criticism of this effort took shape at a time when politics and political identities were being redefined by increasingly powerful appeals to universal rights and the generalized practice of citizenship.23 In Chapter 7 I examine the early trajectory of liberal political practice and discourse in Rio de Janeiro that took shape as a response to, and in dialogue with, a constitutionalist movement that emerged in August 1820, when a diverse group of property owners, merchants, and low ranking military officers in Porto, Portugal successfully staged a rebellion in favor of convoking the formerly consultative Cortes for the deliberative task of writing a constitution. The proclamation of national sovereignty was accompanied by a request that Dom João return to Portugal and together, as defenders of the movement claimed, they represented steps toward rectifying the political and economic afflictions that the Peninsular War and the removal of the royal court from Portugal had created and that the crown had failed to address. In Rio, as residents speculated about how the crown would respond, and about what constitutionalism would mean for them, for the future of monarchy in Brazil, and for the new empire of the United Kingdom, a rebellion of Portuguese troops, with local support, succeeded in winning the crown’s recognition of the legitimacy of the new “constitutional system.” In the weeks and months that followed, constitutionalism then became a transatlantic discourse, forged in pamphlets published in both Portugal and Brazil. Yet it also had a particular resonance within Rio de Janeiro. Its promise of a political “regeneration” recalled the vision of political renewal that defined the New World empire and the New World court after 1808. As the end of absolute royal power appeared to follow from the end of “the old colonial system,” constitutionalism represented the guarantee of a new status quo in which the rights and interests of Rio’s residents were fully recognized. This understanding of constitutionalism diverged from constitutionalism in Portugal, which sought to end what was perceived to be Portugal’s “colonial” condition created by the transfer of the court and an empire of open ports.24 As these different interpretations of constitutionalism took shape, the transatlantic political community that rebels in Portugal and Brazil had set out to “regenerate” was challenged, leaving Rio de Janeiro’s residents to choose between the newly sovereign nation and the ancient Portuguese empire. In the 1820s the choice made in Rio de Janeiro and across Brazil was for the nation, the pátria, redefined in American terms and “protected” by a European monarch called an “emperor.” The maintenance of monarchy, many historians have argued, set a conservative Brazil apart from its republican neighbors in the Americas. Yet, the monarchy that presided over Brazil’s independence was not the monarchy that left Portugal in 1807. If the transfer of the court allowed for the possibility of a transition from colony to empire based on political and institutional continuities and traditions, it also challenged those institutions and traditions and, ultimately, changed their meaning.
NOTES
1. Dom Manuel de Meneses to the [viceroy of Brazil] Conde dos Arcos, January 27, 1808, ANRJ Códice 730, f11; Thomas O’Neill, A concise and accurate account of the proceedings of the squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith … (London: R. Edwards, 1809), 24; and Alan K. Manchester, “The Transfer of the Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro,” in Conflict and Continuity in Brazilian Society, eds. Henry H. Keith and S.F. Edwards (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 154. Estimates of the total number of refugees vary between 10,000 and 15,000. The title of prince regent was given to Dom João, heir to the Portuguese throne, in 1792 when his mother Maria I was found to be unfit to exercise her own sovereignty.
2. José Honório Rodrigues, Independência: revolução e contra-revolução v. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, [1975–76]), 7.
3. Manuel de Oliveira Lima, Dom João VI no Brasil (1808–1821) (1908) v. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1945), 129. The image of a Versailles and of a “tropical Versailles” has had a sustained resonance within visions of urban Brazil. The French urbanist Agache’s plans for reform in early twentieth-century Rio included, as David Underwood has noted, the transformation of one promontory into “an elegant image of a tropical Versailles,” a “spacious, palm-lined, French formal garden with a reflecting pool.” Explicating his plans for Brasília, Lúcio Costa also referred to the Praça dos Tres Poderes as a “Versailles of the People.” See David Underwood, “Alfred Agache, French Sociology, and Modern Urbanism in France and Brazil,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, n. 1 (March 1991), 156, 163.
4. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
5. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); idem, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Antoine de Baecque, “The Allegorical Image of France, 1750–1800: A Political Crisis of Representation,” Representations 47 (Summer 1994), 111–143.
6. The possibility of an Atlantic revolutionary political culture was proposed by R.R. Palmer in The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 2 v. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–64). Palmer argued that the late eighteenth century witnessed a critical moment in the history of “Atlantic Civilization” manifest “in different ways and with varying success in different countries” all marked by “a new feeling for a kind of equality, or at least a discomfort with older forms of social stratification and formal rank.” Within a different chronological and conceptual framework, the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of an age of revolution were also outlined in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Signet, 1962). While both privileged the revolutionary experience in Europe and British North America, recently Lester Langley has offered a more thorough integration of Latin America, especially Spanish America and Haiti, into such a synthesis. See his The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). None of these accounts, however, considers the Luso-Brazilian experience in this age of revolution. For the period prior to the transfer of the court this experience is analyzed in Fernando Novais, Portugal e Brasil na Crise do Antigo Sistema Colonial (1777–1808) (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1979); Carlos Guilherme Mota, Atitudes de Inovação no Brasil, 1789–1801 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, n.d.); and István Jancsó, “A sedução da liberdade: cotidiano e contestação política no final do século XVIII,” in História da Vida Privada no Brasil v. 1, eds. Fernando Novais and Laura de Mello e Souza (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 389–437.
7. Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho to Fernando José de Portugal, August 25, 1798, BNRJ Ms. II–33, 29, 70.
8. Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1.
9. José Acúrsio das Neves, História geral da invasão dos franceses em Portugal e da restauração deste reino (1810) v. 1 (Porto: Afrontamento, n.d.), 224, 229.
10. Conde de Ega cited in Ana Cristina Bartolomeu de Araújo, “O ‘Reino Unido de Portugal, Brasil e Algarves’ 1815–1822,” RHI 14 (1992), 235. See also Heliódoro Jacinto de Araújo Carneiro to Tomás António Vila Nova Portugal, [London], March 3, 1818, AHI Lata 180 Maço 1, who argued that with the transfer of the court “the politics of Europe and perhaps of the Universe changed. …”
11. Visconde de Anadia to Sua Alteza Real, December 14, 1808, in Ângelo Pereira, Os filhos de el-rei D. João VI (Lisbon: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1946), 136.
12. On “the inclusionary pretension of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices” see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 46. On the need to understand the trajectory of liberalism in Latin America in relation to the real and contradictory experiences of liberalism elsewhere rather than the idealized version of its triumph in North America, see Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12.
13. Published in 1908, the centennial of the arrival of the court at Brazil, Oliveira Lima’s account is unequivocally celebratory. He defended Dom João as the founder of “Brazilian nationality” and the creator of a “real political unity” based on “a uniformity of sensations that captured and determined a uniformity of wills.” See Oliveira Lima, Dom João VI, 17–19, 74, 268, 1173. Pedro Calmon’s História do Brasil also celebrates the reign of Dom João as a “golden age.” See v. 4 (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1963), 1382, 1446, 1459, 1475. In subsequent, and decidedly less triumphalist and nationalist, accounts of Brazilian independence, its conservative nature is nevertheless sustained and also attributed to the court’s presence. See Caio Prado Jr., Evolução Política do Brasil, Colônia e Império (1933) (São Paulo: Brasiliense, n.d.); Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, “A herança colonial-sua desagregação,” in História geral da civilização brasileira t.1, v. 1, ed. Buarque de Holanda (1960) (São Paulo: DIFEL, 1985); Maria Odila Silva Dias, “A Interiorização da Metrópole,” in 1822: Dimensões, ed. Carlos Guilherme Mota (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1972), in English as “The Establishment of the Royal Court in Brazil,” in From Colony to Nation, Essays on the Independence of Brazil, ed. A.J.R. Russell-Wood (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Carlos Guilherme Mota and Fernando Novais, A Independência Política do Brasil (São Paulo: Moderna, 1983); and more recently, Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves, “Corcundas, constitucionais e pes-de-chumbo: a cultura política da Independência, 1820–1822” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of São Paulo, 1992) and Jurandir Malerba, “A corte no exilio. Interpretação do Brasil joanino (1808–1821)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of São Paulo, 1997). Within comparative discussions, Brazilian independence also exemplifies a conservative transition. See, for example, Brian R. Hamnett, “Process and Pattern: A Re-Examination of the Ibero-American Independence Movements, 1808–1826,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, pt. 2 (May 1997), 298–299.
14. As Roderick Barman has recently noted, compared with the independence of Spanish America and the United States, Brazilian independence remains relatively understudied. See Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 65–66. This lack of scholarship can also be attributed to the influence of Marxist formulations of Brazil’s historical development in which the transfer of the court and independence figure not as moments of political conflict per se, but rather as a resolution of the internal contradictions within capitalism in which the mercantilist pact was broken and the continuation of Brazil’s “dependent” integration into a capitalist world economy was ensured. See Caio Prado Jr., Evolução, 44–52, and Mota and Novais, Independência, 5. In the 1960s and 1970s this economic explanation for independence suggested disappointingly little consequences for social and economic structures in Brazil as these very structures became privileged subjects for historians and political history in general waned. On the waning of political history, see Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: History, Culture, and Text,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1–4. On the same trend in Brazilian history see Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, xvii; Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, “A nova ‘velha história’: o retorno da história política,” Estudos Históricos 10 (1992), 265–271; Angela Castro Gomes, “Política: história, ciencia, cultura, etc.,” Estudos Históricos 17 (1996), 59–84; and Stuart B. Schwartz, “Somebodies and Nobodies in the Body Politic: Mentalities and Social Structures in Colonial Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 31, n. 1 (1996).
15. Along with Barman, Brazil, Iara Lis Carvalho Souza, Pátria Coroada: O Brasil como Corpo Político Autônomo, 1780–1831 (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 1998); and Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: questão nacional e questão colonial na crise do antigo regime português (Porto: Afrontamento, 1993), see also Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra, A Utopia do Poderoso Império, Portugal e Brasil: Bastidores da Política, 1798–1822 (Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1994).
16. José Murilo de Carvalho, “Political Elites and State Building: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, n. 3 (July 1982), 382, 397.
17. Hunt, “Introduction,” in The New Cultural History, 17. On politics, culture, and “the new political history” see also Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 10–13; Dror Wahrman, “The New Political History: A Review Essay,” Social History 21, n. 3 (October 1996), 343–354; Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” and William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, eds. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On language and political discourse see J.G.A. Pocock, “Introduction: The state of the art,” in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On the question of Brazil’s political history see Viotti da Costa, “Introduction,” in Brazilian Empire; and Barbara Weinstein, “Not the Republic of Their Dreams: Historical Obstacles to Political and Social Democracy in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 29, n. 2 (1994), 262–273.
18. Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Leila Mezan Algranti, O feitor ausente: estudos sobre a escravidão urbana no Rio de Janeiro—1808–1822 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988) and idem, Honradas e devotas: mulheres da Colônia: Condição feminina nos conventos e recolhimentos do Sudeste do Brasil, 1750–1822 (Rio de Janeiro/Brasília: José Olympio/EDUNB, 1993); Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, Cultura e sociedade no Rio de Janeiro (1808–1821) (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1977); idem, Sistema de casamento no Brasil colonial (São Paulo: T.A. Queiroz, 1984); and idem, Vida Privada e Quotidiano no Brasil. Na época de D. Maria e D. João VI (Lisbon: Estampa, 1993).
19. In Oliveira Lima’s work politics are constituted in either the conflicts and intrigues of the royal cabinet or diplomacy and administration, while Rio’s residents appear as part of an exotic “environment” with which Dom João had “an intimate correspondence.” See Lima, Dom João, v. 1, 17–19, 74. For a similar critique of Oliveira Lima’s O Movimento da Independência (1922), see Nanci Leonzo, “Oliveira Lima: O Dramaturgo da Independência,” Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Pesquisa Histórica (São Paulo) 2 (1984/85), 55. The marked absence of a popular dimension of early nineteenth-century politics is also asserted in subsequent work that both sustains and departs from Oliveira Lima’s nationalist framework. Although José Honório Rodrigues, for example, characterized Oliveira Lima’s work as a “conservative thesis” that privileged the role of the monarch, in his own account of independence Rodrigues also reaffirmed that “the people resigned themselves to a chain of events that emanated from a few individuals.” See Rodrigues, Independência, v. 4, 124–25, 130, and v. 5, 255–256. See also Tobias Monteiro, História do império. A elaboração da Independencia (Rio de Janeiro: F. Briguiet, 1927), 313; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, xix, 7; and Barman, Brazil, 6. Francisco Falcon and Ilmar Roloff Santos qualify this argument characterizing the urban popular classes as “permeable to certain revolutionary words,” whereas the “great rural masses, the slave labor force, in its immense majority, remained anonymous and mute.” See their “O Processo de Independência no Rio de Janeiro,” in 1822: Dimensões, ed. Mota, 316–317. More recently, Lucia Maria Neves has argued that the politics of independence resembled a “a theater without an audience” and “a dialogue between segments of the Brazilian and Portuguese elite.” See Neves, “Corcundas,” v. 1, 10–11.
20. William Roseberry has argued for a similar understanding of local political culture using the concept of hegemony. “What hegemony constructs,” he writes, “is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.” Such a “common material and meaningful framework is,” he further explains, “in part, discursive: a common language or way of talking about social relationships that sets out the central terms around which and in terms of which contestation and struggle can occur.” See William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 361.
21. Silva Dias, “Interiorização,” 171.
22. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 157.
23. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
24. See, for example, Jacome Ratton, “Lettres de Jacques Ratton a António de Araújo de Azevedo, Comte da Barca (1812–1817),” Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises (nouvelle série) 25 (1964), 219–228.