João da Silva Lisboa (the Visconde de Cairu) declared in his História dos principais sucessos do Império do Brasil (1830) that, on 7 September 1822, Dom Pedro I proclaimed the ‘Brazilian nation's complete independence’. Since Cairu, Brazilian nationalist historiography has tended to see independence as a clear break between Brazil and Portugal, marred only by the emperor's ill-advised and unpatriotic interest in his native country's affairs. Recent historians of both Brazil and Portugal after 1822 largely ignore, respectively, the former metropolis and the former colony. Broader narratives of the period that frame its history as part of the Age of Revolution focus on the advocates of revolutionary change and the forces that led to imperial dissolution. Gabriel Paquette (Johns Hopkins University) challenges these dominant approaches by ‘blurring the boundary between … colonial [and] national history’ (p. 14) and by paying attention ‘to the countervailing, conciliatory, conservative forces which outnumbered and overwhelmed more radical forces seeking or tending toward imperial disaggregation’ (p. 9).
Paquette develops his argument in five long chapters, the first of which presents imperial reformers' successes. An ‘unusual intellectual openness’ (p. 46) prevailed in the Luso-Atlantic enlightenment and reformers achieved much in their efforts to integrate the empire, to develop new resources and to capitalise on opportunities such as the collapse of sugar production in the French colonies. To be sure, Lisbon could not gain control over the booming independent South Atlantic economy, centred on sugar production and the Angola–Brazil slave trade; reformers recognised the problems of the slave trade and the perils of the free-trade regime which the British imposed on the empire in 1808 and 1810, but could do little other than hope for European immigration and lament that the opening of commerce undermined imperial unity.
Chapter 2 shows how the French and then British occupations of Portugal deprived the country of its central place in the empire and laid the groundwork for the constitutionalist regimes instituted by the 1820 Porto Revolution. The story of Pedro's break with the Lisbon Cortes (parliament) – the stuff of Brazilian nationalist narratives of independence – gets little attention in this chapter, which instead focuses on the close connections among debates in the Cortes and in the abortive Brazilian constituent assembly of 1823. By the end of that year, the constitutionalist experiments in both countries were over; paradoxically, however, the ‘shared constitutional-intellectual culture’ intensified transatlantic connections even as divisions between Portuguese and Brazilians also emerged more clearly.
The years from 1823 to 1826 – the focus of chapter 3 – marked ‘a failure to separate the two sides of the Atlantic in a definitive manner’ (p. 164). Although Portuguese recognition of Brazilian independence came in 1825, João IV's death prompted Pedro to bestow a constitution on Portugal (closely modelled on the one that he granted to Brazil in 1824) and to abdicate his claim to the Portuguese throne in favour of his daughter, Maria da Glória. Many in Portugal anticipated a dynastic union of the two countries, but the Brazilian emperor's ‘obstinate infatuation with constitutionalism’ (p. 217) significantly complicated matters, an argument developed in chapter 4. Miguelists (supporters of Pedro's brother, Miguel, who seized the Portuguese throne) rejected the 1826 Constitution but evinced contradictory tendencies, including a desire to restore the crown to past glories, efforts to strengthen the aristocracy, and ultra-Catholic exaltation of the clergy. Much of this chapter focuses on the Cartista (constitutionalist) exiles and their campaign on behalf of Maria da Glória, for whom they eventually established a regency in the Azores. Before his 1831 abdication of the Brazilian throne, Pedro offered but limited support to the regency (he had become much more conservative and authoritarian in the late 1820s). After 1831, he nevertheless championed the constitutionalist cause in the Portuguese Civil War and secured his daughter's throne and the Portuguese constitutional regime (with revisions and occasional suspensions, his charter remained in force until 1910). This was, according to Paquette, ‘the last Atlantic revolution’ (p. 235).
In chapter 5, Paquette argues that Portugal's turn to African colonialism during the Regeneração (Regeneration) of the 1850s drew heavily on earlier debates about empire and amounted to a ‘smartened-up atavism of policies which percolated in the decades prior to 1808’ (p. 323). That Portugal needed to reinvigorate its remaining tropical empire was one of the few things that Miguelists and constitutionalists could agree on; while the debates and proposals of the 1820s to the 1840s yielded ‘unspectacular’ results (p. 371), they laid the intellectual groundwork for Portugal's later African empire.
With relatively limited archival research in mostly diplomatic sources, Imperial Portugal is an impressive synthesis of secondary works, both Brazilian and Portuguese. The book is unabashedly ‘old-fashioned’ imperial political history, with a heavy focus on monarchs and statesmen, which Paquette justifies on the grounds that ‘elite political projects, dynastic considerations, and their intellectual imaginaries and agency … have been relegated too far to the historiographical sidelines’. Such men formed ‘a major mechanism through which politics were made’, and students of ‘local, popular experiences and participation’ – the focus of so much recent scholarship – must acknowledge that rulers often set the contexts in which everyone from slaves to planters operated (p. 13). The book's major contributions include Paquette's willingness to give conservative and reactionary thinkers their due, to identify the long-term connections between eighteenth-century imperial reform and nineteenth-century conservative thought, to elucidate complex transatlantic political manoeuvring and to remind us of the American empire's many legacies for later Portuguese history. The task for future historians will be to integrate fully Paquette's insights with the findings of those who analyse specific regions of the Lusophone world, those who focus on the popular classes and social tensions at the time of independence, or those who study the champions of radical change.
