Jeffrey Needell makes a major contribution to the political history of the Brazilian Empire (1822–89) with this richly researched study of the conservative factions that coalesced in the 1820s and went on to dominate national politics by mid-century. Basing his analysis on the correspondence, publications and speeches of prominent politicians, he lays out the partisan battles of a powerful element of the ruling class to which earlier scholarship does not do justice. Although he studies a very traditional topic – the construction of a ruling political bloc – Needell's work is pioneering in many ways, not least in its careful narrative of struggles by members of the ‘Party of Order’ and its later incarnation, the Conservative Party, to impose their vision of the nation-state in the first half-century of Brazil's independence. Indeed, his argument for the very existence of such a project is in itself a useful achievement; he approaches conservative thought with a welcome seriousness and subtlety. Needell's ambitions are much greater than this, however, and lead him to broader and more provocative points.

Needell begins his analysis with a consideration of the socio-economic and political context of the men who would make up the Party of Order. From this first chapter forward, he stresses the intimate links between these men and the structures of power that defined early independent Brazilian society. What stands out here is his nuanced sense of the regional and national levels of interest that guided these men's actions and informed their ideas. He shows, for instance, that the locus of ‘reactionary’ politics (his term for conservative forces before the emergence of the Conservative Party proper) was not simply the centre-south of the country or the older coffee zones of Rio de Janeiro. Rather, he teases out the differences that occasionally surfaced between reactionaries of the baixada fluminense, the agricultural lowlands around the city of Rio, and the serra, or highlands. He adds to this appreciation of the geography of power later by explaining also the changing influence of other provinces, though his research remains firmly grounded in the reactionary heartland of Rio. He enriches this history by tracing the career paths of both famous and largely forgotten members of great reactionary families; in doing so, he highlights the ways in which patronage and ideology intermingled in the creation and subsequent reshaping of the Party of Order.

Proceeding from the argument that the reactionaries developed a coherent political vision, Needell re-evaluates common understandings of several key points in nineteenth-century Brazilian history. His exploration of the defining reactionary themes of monarchism, constitutionalism and national unity, for instance, casts the liberal experiment of the early 1830s as weaker and more exceptional than other scholars have portrayed it. In Needell's telling, the liberals were themselves split between radical democrats and a strong moderate faction; general concerns over the unrest visible in the period's regional rebellions led some moderates to move rightward and join the reactionary bloc that rose to power by the end of the 1830s. Even more useful, perhaps, are his accounts of events under-analysed in existing scholarship. In particular, he unravels the partisan struggles that took place from the Conciliation period (1853–7, in the strictest sense) into the 1860s with admirable clarity. Here he provides a solid sense not only of the battles between the political parties but also of the growing tensions between conservative groups and the monarch they had supported fiercely. His chapter on the fateful year of 1871, which led to the Free Womb Law but also to increasingly open challenges to the constitutional monarchy, continues this fine analysis to a moment of great crisis in the regime.

In all of this, Needell's focus is almost entirely on the machinations of leaders of the Party of Order and especially on their conceptions of the state. His portrait of reactionary ideology would, however, benefit from a more explicit comparison to liberal thought; although his reminder that liberals were more a jumbled, anti-reactionary opposition than a unitary movement in the 1840s is a useful historiographical correction, too often the reader feels the lack of liberal counterpoints in Needell's text. This is especially notable because of Needell's arguments that ideology was central to partisan politics in these decades. Unlike those who see clientelistic favour as the overwhelming characteristic of nineteenth-century Brazilian politics, he asserts that ideology, too, occupied a key place in the definition and motivation of parties and their leadership. Further contrasts to liberalism would strengthen his position here, particularly in relation to the years after Dom Pedro II took the throne in 1840. Nevertheless, his grasp on the complicated motives of individual elite actors, who responded both to ideological commitments and to the demands of patronage, means that The Party of Order is no idealist history. At times the reader might want Needell to address the causal power of ideology more directly – given his evident desire to revise analyses of the Empire as ruled by patronage – but the multi-causal narrative he ends up with is a balanced depiction of high politics in the Empire.

Precisely because Needell is so meticulous in his own analysis of partisan events and so explicit in his engagement of his data, he rightly demands the same rigour of his colleagues. Some of his criticisms of other histories target problematic logic and questionable uses of evidence. Others, however, are certainly ungenerous evaluations of works which pursue visions of political history that diverge from Needell's own methods or perspectives (pp. 272–3). Needell's work often approaches the magisterial as a political history that sheds new light on reactionary/conservative thought, on its variations and intellectual sources, and on high political events in the period it covers. Early on in the book, though, Needell introduces a somewhat defensive tone with an apologia for conventional political history – the study of political elites and their ideas – that seems unnecessary. One hopes that other recent political histories of Latin America have not made the study of such obviously powerful forces seem a trivial or wrong-headed enterprise. Needell certainly seems to believe that the historiography has taken that turn, for he presents his understanding of the proper history of politics with a marked tetchiness. At points he comes close to demanding that political history be seen from the point of view of elite actors alone and based on the discourses of political officials. Moreover, at points in the text and especially in his generally valuable endnotes, he is ungenerous in his evaluations of works that are too speculative for his taste or which use documentation that is very different from his sources.

The polemicism that drives these judgments is only occasionally distracting, however. Fortunately, The Party of Order's many strengths pull the reader's attention to the overriding contribution of the work: this is a thoughtful study that brings conservative elites to their rightful place in the political history of nineteenth-century Brazil. Rich in empirical data and suggestive revisionist arguments, Needell's book is one that scholars in the field will find intriguing and perhaps even essential.