In 1798, Portuguese officials in Bahia, Brazil, accused more than thirty Pardos (free African-descended men), 12 enslaved people, and 12 white men of plotting to overturn colonial rule. This movement later came to be known as the “Tailors’ Conspiracy,” in reference to the occupation of many of those involved in the movement. Through a careful reading of the trial proceedings, Greg L. Childs offers a nuanced portrayal of the participants, their aspirations, and the true nature of their coalition. Most notably, Seditious Spaces invites us to understand this and similar uprisings not only as driven by radical ideas but as sustained by relations of care and healing.
The author traces the origins of the conspiracy to the culture of refusal that developed in Bahia during the War of the Debatable Lands (1775–78). Faced with imperial demands for loyalty and military service, ordinary people evaded conscription, sheltered fugitives, and disrupted agricultural production. These acts of resistance were often grounded in intergroup relations that enabled collective defiance of imperial authority. Childs also situates the rebellion within “a wave of insurrectionary activity” that shook the Portuguese empire during the last decades of the eighteenth century (p. 4). Seditious Spaces draws our attention to events in Goa, Minas Gerais, and the Kingdom of Kongo that reveal shared imperial vulnerabilities—including military strain and racism—the spread of reformist aspirations across the empire, and the central role of enslavement in Portuguese imperialism and colonial political cultures.
What has traditionally been labeled as the “Tailors’ Conspiracy,” the book shows, was in fact a convergence of several seditious activities in Bahia during the late 1790s. At the core of the movement were free(d) Pardo men, most of them soldiers and/or artisans. Yet this was far from a solely Pardo initiative: individuals from other social groups also played active roles in this and other conspiratorial networks within the city. Indeed, Childs argues that colonial authorities deliberately sought to obscure evidence of white elite involvement, both to downplay the movement’s significance and to shield influential figures from retribution.
The book’s central contention is that the movement’s radical nature lay not in the conspirators’ ideals or plans, which ranged from demands to improve soldiers’ conditions to lofty declarations of equality, but on their relationships. Childs traces the intimate connections between the conspirators, their shared moments of pain and joy, as well as the care and healing they offered one another. In an enslaved society, he argues, such bonds carried revolutionary potential.
This analytical perspective represents a major departure from conventional views of anticolonial conspiracies and revolutions in the region, where masculinity is often linked to violence and daring forms of political action. While Childs does an excellent job of recovering the stories of women who likely participated in the conspiracy (and whose involvement was erased or disregarded by colonial authorities), this is primarily a narrative of men coming together, attuning themselves to one another, and forging a coalition. The author’s emphasis on relationships, however, at times comes at the expense of fully engaging with the role of ideas and the importance of imagined futures in mobilizing participants. A more sustained exploration of “care” and its connection to local understandings of masculinity in Bahia would have helped ground the concept more firmly in context and shed light on how the actors themselves understood their emotional and social labor.
Seditious Spaces is a thoughtful, rigorous study of the 1798 sedition in Bahia. Childs threads carefully both with and against the colonial archive, uncovering the distortions and silences embedded in the official proceedings. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of the social and spatial dynamics that underpinned the movement, and a fresh perspective on Afro-Brazilian political cultures. Seditious Spaces offers a compelling example of how to move beyond archival skepticism and attend to the emotional and social textures of past political life.
