Histories of the “Age of Revolution” in the Americas usually emphasize the rise of republicanism, the overthrow of empires, and the spreading of sentiment against the African slave trade. Many such histories have therefore struggled to incorporate the Empire of Brazil, which emerged from the Age of Revolution as a slave-trading monarchy. In his excellent Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution, Tyson Reeder has solved this problem; he uses the history of U.S. commerce to explain the place of the Luso-Atlantic in this eventful era of American history. In so doing, he has done historians and economic historians an enormous service.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots traces trade relations between British North America (later, the United States) and the Portuguese Empire (later, principally Brazil) between the mid-eighteenth century and the establishment of the Brazilian monarchy in the 1820s. The fluctuations of trade during these turbulent years were driven on the one hand by empires’ desires to secure themselves geopolitically while managing domestic concerns, and on the other hand, by merchants’ ardent and enduring desire to make money. In Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots, which is at times a history of imperial interaction and at others a comparative study, Reeder traces the outline of a shadow-alliance between Brazil and the United States that never quite came to fruition. Both countries hosted powerful and potentially compatible movements in favor of free trade and republicanism. An alliance organized around these powerful commitments seemed frequently in the air. However, the vagaries of international politics, as well as disagreements within the two countries about the viability and compatibility of free trade and republicanism, continually prevented such an alliance from taking shape.

The book begins with the seventeenth-century Anglo-Portuguese alliance that first defined British North America’s interactions with Portugal and its imperial possessions. Moving swiftly to the latter half of the eighteenth century, Reeder contrasts British attempts to rein in Anglo-American smuggling—characteristic, in his estimation, of an overall British harshness toward American merchants—with what he views as more conciliatory Portuguese attitudes toward Brazilian merchants.

From the American Revolution through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, trade between the United States and the Portuguese Empire lurched through a series of transitions. Defined by the vagaries of war, these are hard to summarize. It suffices to say that traders were swift to take advantage of new legal opportunities (e.g., citizens of the United States plying trade routes that the British Navigation Acts had barred), illegal ones (e.g., smuggling), and even the unique legal gray areas of the Age of Revolution, like privateering on behalf of José Gervasio Artigas’s “Free Peoples of the Littoral.”

Reeder’s efforts to embed this extraordinary commercial history within a story about free trade ideology are not always successful. He asserts, for example, that “British-American and Brazilian traders operated in an Enlightenment paradigm that assumed that open commerce resulted in prosperity. To that end, they smuggled with abandon” (p. 37). It is unclear how exactly the “Enlightenment paradigm” was at work here, particularly given that, as Reeder acknowledges, “traders … did not philosophize about the political or moral implications of their commerce,” (p. 38). Too often, the book aligns the opportunistic behavior of smugglers and privateers with a “vision of … republicanism” (p. 181) without explaining who held that vision or to what actual effect. Moreover, in reality, American merchants rarely smuggled in order to achieve open commerce. As they well knew, smuggling was often profitable precisely because of the thickets of imperial trade restrictions that governed international trade, especially during wartime. For many American merchants, the fruit of peace and free trade, after 1783 and again after 1815, was bankruptcy.

After U.S. independence, as Reeder adeptly shows, North American traders had high hopes for Brazil. Tax revolts and regional republican movements in Brazil gave Americans reason to hope that Brazil would eventually join a pan-American alliance of like-minded republican, free-trading states. But such an alliance would not come to be. The Portuguese monarchy, arriving in Brazil in 1808, successfully conciliated its wealthiest creole merchants and repressed a series of republican insurgencies. It did so, moreover, just as Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on U.S. foreign trade took effect. Jefferson scholars may struggle with Reeder’s characterization of the embargo as something that “obliterated illusions of a unique republican commitment to free trade,” but it seems inarguable that the nearly simultaneous events of the monarchy’s arrival and the embargo destroyed hopes of a U.S.-Brazilian alliance organized around free trade and republicanism (p. 143). By the 1820s, American traders had managed to establish a healthy trade with Brazil, but the (monarchical) British had established a much bigger one. And even the American traders to Brazil were not losing sleep over the fact that Brazil remained a monarchy. In fact, as racist discourse swelled in the United States, many Americans came to believe that monarchy was the only appropriate form of government for a country with a heavily black and mixed race population.

Economic historians, as well as historians of commerce, should rejoice at the wealth of data on early U.S. trade with the Portuguese Empire that Tyson Reeder has acquired, organized, and made meaningful in this book. Much of this data is drawn from Portuguese sources in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro archives. By placing it into conversation with statistics from the better-known American State Papers, Reeder has produced a work with a real backbone, one that does not need to restrict its claims to what Americans believed to be true about their place in the world. Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots is a worthy companion to works like Thomas Truxes, Defying Empire (Yale, 2008); David Hancock, Oceans of Wine (Yale, 2009); or Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies (Cambridge, 2010). In addition, it opens the door for exciting new research, for example, on nineteenth century U.S. commerce and political economy, or on the “late” Atlantic World and its slave trade. Perhaps most excitingly, it enables fresh comparisons between the Portuguese and Brazilian Empires and the early United States, which is now increasingly understood, in its own right, to have been an empire.