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A expansão do Brasil e a formação dos estados na Bacia do Prata: Argentina, Uruguai e Paraguai (da colonização à Guerra da Tríplice Aliança)

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2211047

1527-1900

Michael Kenneth Huner,

Brazilian History and Foreign Policy

The War of the Triple Alliance (or the Paraguayan War, 1864 – 70) has long served as a historical laboratory for scholars to explore ideas about nation building and imperialism in nineteenth-century South America. For a time during the latter half of the last century, scholars were enthralled to find in nineteenth-century Paraguay an autonomous challenge to the encroachment of British imperial capitalism, and they used this as a satisfying conceptual model to explain the conflict. In other words, British capitalist interests were the alleged true masterminds and beneficiaries of a war that used the client states of Brazil and Argentina to crush an alternative form of socioeconomic national development built by an independent Paraguayan state.Most scholars have, by now, abandoned this interpretation due to a series of subsequent studies that found it had little empirical merit. Yet if the response to a recent article in the Economist about Paraguayan political life and the memory of the war is any indication, the interpretation still holds its appeal among a general reading public, many of whom are of South American origin. The fourth edition of Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira’s intriguing work, A expansão do Brasil e a formação dos estados na Bacia do Prata, manifests its relevance in the context of this ongoing conversation about the war. This diplomatic history, originally completed as Dr. Moniz Bandeira’s doctoral thesis during the mid-1970s, was one of the empirical works that undermined assigning any primary role to Great Britain in instigating the regionwide conflict. It effectively demonstrates that the involved combatants had plenty of their own material and geopolitical interests at stake. Yet the work does not eschew a conceptual role for imperialism to help explain the development of the war. And, on this account, its ability to still captivate the thinking of specialists should also be noted.Although much of the research and analysis of the book culminates around explaining the war, Moniz Bandeira takes the long view. The study begins with an examination of Portuguese imperial expansion into the Río de la Plata region from the early days of the colonial period, with the infiltration of bandeirantes and slave traders into the Spanish-claimed lands of the Upper Paraná. However, Moniz Bandeira notes that it was the emergence of Buenos Aires as the hub of interimperial contraband trade, typically trafficking in the flows of Potosí silver and African slaves, which decidedly turned the port, and the region at large, into a target of Portuguese imperial ambition. These ambitions persisted, and perhaps grew, into the late colonial, independence, and early postcolonial periods. Moniz Bandeira’s discussion of the founding of the Côlonia do Sacramento outpost, the 1817 Portuguese military occupation of the Banda Oriental (while the crown resided in Rio de Janeiro), and 1825 – 28 war with Argentina reminds readers, as other scholars have emphasized in recent years, how the extended processes of decolonization throughout the Americas, and especially in the Río de la Plata, remained wrought with interimperial competition. Spain, Great Britain, France, Portugal, and, subsequently, the Empire of Brazil were the imperial players in this regard alongside new postcolonial republican states and insurgencies. And here Moniz Bandeira identifies the postcolonial, but still monarchic, Brazilian state as less of a rupture with and more of a curious outgrowth of the Portuguese colonial regime that crucially had been centered for a formative time in Brazil itself. The Brazilian state, he contends, inherited intact the strength of an established governing and diplomatic apparatus and eventually emerged by the mid-nineteenth century as the preponderant power in the region. He pushes us to indeed appreciate postcolonial Brazil as an imperial entity as well, just as its official title suggested.The challenge of an emergent Paraguayan state then was not at all against the interests of Great Britain but against those of imperial Brazil. Here Moniz Bandeira also provides a substantial overview of upstart Plata republics and the fluid national configurations that attended them and their relationship with the Brazilian behemoth. The depiction left of Paraguay is nonetheless also a typical one: the export-monopoly, family-estate operation whose renewed stake in the regional yerba maté trade financed its limited acquisition of industrial military technology and inspired its bluster. However ill-positioned to really challenge Brazilian hegemony, Paraguay’s potential choke-hold on the Upper Plata river system — sealing off the empire from its province Mato Grosso — and its willingness to gamble on the powder keg of Uruguayan domestic conflict to alter the dynamics of economic influence in the Plata set the stage for a war that Brazil proved all too eager to fight.Otherwise soundly researched, the work’s limited incorporation of new literature on the war largely confines its interpretation of state action to being the mere pursuit of material interests and the settling of borders. But these remain important considerations, as scholars may choose to explore other dynamics of homegrown postcolonial imperialism in the region, its impact on state formation, and the unfolding of a terrible war.