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Political Struggle, Ideology, and State Building: Pernambuco and the Construction of Brazil, 1817 – 1850

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-109

1527-1900

Gabriel Paquette,

History of Colonial Brazil

Jeffrey Mosher has succeeded in producing an important book that will become a touchstone for historiographical debates for years to come. His book demonstrates the complexity of nation-state formation in Brazil and, by focusing on the violent, sometimes protracted revolts that repeatedly and decisively rocked the northeastern province of Pernambuco (in 1817, 1824, 1831, 1832 – 35, and 1848), suggests that Brazil’s constitutional and political form at midcentury largely resulted from the interplay of the conflict that pitted provinces against the court based in Rio de Janeiro. In this erudite study, Mosher demonstrates convincingly that previous analysts of Brazilian politics in the period 1820 – 50, who focus exclusively on kinship and patronage networks, fail to understand the dynamic that pitted province against capital. Moreover, he demonstrates how much is gained when provincial politics are taken seriously, revealing the “mutual influence between provincial social and political struggles on the one hand and politics in the national capital on the other” (p. 7).While Mosher’s book is at its strongest and most innovative when he treats the minutiae of Pernambuco’s politics — Recife’s family rivalries, the pedigrees and career trajectories of the principal protagonists of the episodes he recounts, the main institutions of the province and the sources of conflict between them — he also has produced several chapters of broader interest, perhaps deserving of incorporation into upper-level undergraduate syllabi. The first chapter, “The Portuguese Empire in the Age of Revolution: Pernambuco, 1817,” is the best treatment in English of this revolt, an episode that is commonly mentioned in passing as a harbinger of the fissures threatening to tear the empire asunder, but one which is rarely situated in imperial context, let alone described at length. The second chapter, which treats the famous 1824 Confederation of the Equator and its aftermath, is equally worthy of praise. Here Mosher introduces one of the leitmotivs of the remainder of his narrative: how Recife’s elites would “seek the support of the government in Rio de Janeiro when trying to bolster their position in the province. Once they were secure in their independence, however, they would often zealously guard their independence from the central government” (p. 55). He returns to this theme repeatedly to explain the shifting and otherwise perplexing political stances taken by Pernambucan elites toward the regime in Rio de Janeiro. Mosher next turns to Pernambuco’s politics during the first years of the Regency (1831 – 40), a period which produced a number of revolts in the province — the Setembrizada, the Novembrada, the Abrilada, and the Guerra dos Cabanos. While Roderick Barman’s landmark 1988 Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798 – 1852 covers some of the same territory, Mosher’s use of provincial archives as well as the recent secondary literature enriches previous accounts and indicates how “slaves, Indians, and the urban and rural poor . . . seized the opportunity presented by intra-elite conflicts” (p. 120).Mosher then turns to the efforts of the imperial government in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1840s to create networks of judicial and police power that endowed the cabinet, through the power of appointment, with command over judicial and police posts throughout the empire. The resistance of Pernambucan elites to this effort, and their eventual accommodation to the new state of affairs, consumes much of chapters 4 – 6. Perhaps the most original chapter is one based on Mosher’s earlier HAHR article (80:4, 2000) entitled “Political Parties, Popular Mobilization, and the Portuguese.” Mosher shows how “Lusophobia,” or anti-Portuguese sentiment, was a major factor in Brazil-ian politics in the 1830s and 1840s. It was fomented by liberals as well as conservatives. As Mosher points out, “there was no necessary conflict between Lusophobic violence and the values of legitimate authority, nationalism, and monarchy” (p. 204). In his final chapter, on the Praieira Revolution of 1848 – 50, Mosher offers English-language scholarship a remarkably detailed account of that conflict, concluding that the defeat of the liberal revolutionaries illustrated “the effectiveness of the reactionary institutions of the monarchy” (p. 248).Overall, Mosher has produced an excellent work of scholarship, showing the pivotal importance of an understudied subject. It is for the most part well written, though repetition plagues the middle chapters and the brief, perfunctory conclusion does a disservice to what is a first-rate book deserving of a wide readership.