A Independência brasileira: Novas dimensões (review)

Twenty years ago, in the late 1980s, historians suddenly saw the light. As Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities worked its magic, the nation-state and its twin, nationalism, previously regarded with indifference, even disdain, transmuted into hot topics for research. Their allure continues as this volume attests, the outcome of a conference of "a new generation of scholars" held at Oxford University in 2003. As these essays also show, the nation-state and nationalism pose considerable challenges for historians. To be effective research requires a willingness to address and rethink the basic assumptions – myths would be not too strong a term – on which scholars have been raised. It is no coincidence that a pre-eminent writer on the nation-state and nationalism, Eric Hobsbawm, was born in Egypt of central European parents and resident in his nation (Great Britain) only as a teenager. Marxism, not nationalism, provided Hobsbawm with his context and sense of identity, and it was precisely this detachment from the orthodoxies that made his volumes on the long nineteenth-century so incisive and so successful.

Hobsbawm's newly published book, Democracy and Terrorism, remarks in respect to the foundation of ex-colonial states that "even in countries with a history of liberation struggle, separation from empire was a more complex process than official nationalist history allows." In the case of the independence of Brazil, José Honório's Rodrigues' five volumes (1975–76) and the first chapters of Emilia Viotti da Costa's history of the Empire (1977) exemplify the nationalist school. Not until the turn of the century did historians in Brazil begin to study in some depth their country's emergence as a nation state. Central to this development has been the Seminário Brasil: Formação do estado e da nação (1780–1850), based on the Universidade de São Paulo, which has resulted in two volumes (2003 and 2005) edited by its director István Janscó.

The present volume, despite being the fruit of a conference in England, very much reflects the influence of the Seminário Brasil. Seven of the eleven contributors are Brazilian and of these four, including Jurandir Malerba, the editor, hold doctorates from São Paulo. Welcome as are the studies produced by the Seminário Brasil, they cannot be termed ruthless when considering Brazil's naturalness, its inevitability as a nation state, and the securing of national independence. Despite claims to be setting the Brazilian experience within a broader conceptual and factual context, readers may be forgiven if they get the impression, particularly from Malerba's overview of recent historiography (19–52), that only Brazilians can understand their country's past and that their researches and writings take priority.

Conference proceedings tend to be uneven in content and, despite assertions that the conference included a new generation of historians and offered fresh insights into the independence period, the volume does not escape this problem. The contributions by Marcia Regina Berbel, Isabel Lustosa, Iara Lis Schiavinatto (formerly Souza Carvalho), Karen Schultz, and Lila Moritz Schwarcz essentially rework research previously published, two of the five authors being senior historians. Some of the articles, such as that by João Pinto Furtado and Malerba's "De homens e títulos" (153–77), call for fuller development. Jorge Miguel Pedreira' rebuttal (55–97) of the thesis that Brazilian independence was due to a basic crisis in the "colonial pact" is hardly as "innovative" and "controversial" as the editor claims (12), given that the thesis has never secured broad acceptance. Anthony McFarlane's essay comparing independence movements in the Americas, interesting as it is, was composed subsequent to the conference and, being placed at the end, is very much an add-on.

The articles focus mainly on events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which are taken to be "national." The role of the rest of Brazil receives little attention save for Hendrik Kraay's study of popular support for independence in Bahia province. Thanks to original...