Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 by Gabriel Paquette (review)

Challenging more conventional histories, Paquette emphasizes late eighteenth-century attempts to revamp the empire, the strength of conservative/loyalist feeling in both Portugal and Brazil before and after independence, and the importance of the slave trade in bridging the pre-and postindependence eras. For him, Brazilian independence was “a highly contingent, generally unsought and somewhat undesirable break.” Much survived in “the long shadow of empire” after independence, with economic, academic, and kinship ties crisscrossing the Atlantic, until Portugal and Brazil finally lost touch in the mid-nineteenth century. This book is strong on the Luso-Brazilian Atlantic system and the complex internal debates that spanned the era but gives less space to the broader European and international context. The conclusions reached by the Luso-Brazilian elite were indeed idiosyncratic, and some of the steps taken—particularly the relocation of the court—were genuinely innovative. But the possibilities were limited, and more often than not imperial policy represented adaptations to circumstances well beyond either Portugal’s or Brazil’s control.