History of Imperialism Research Papers (original) (raw)

This book traces the history of Portugal and its overseas dominions from approximately 1770 until just before 1850. Historians generally refer to this period as the "Age of Revolution (s)," when the imperial institutions, non-state networks, and commercial circuits knitting the early modern Atlantic World together became unraveled and new polities and connections, formal and informal, emerged from the ruins. In its Luso-Atlantic variant, the principal thrust of scholarly research has concerned the processes -long-term preconditions, medium-term precipitants, and short-term triggers -which culminated in Brazil's formal, political independence in the early 1820s. Historians have noted and analyzed how the timing, nature, and extent of Brazil's separation from Portugal differed from the processes by which British North America, French Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America wrested sovereignty from their respective metropoles. Yet there have been surprisingly few attempts to de-center the process of imperial breakdown, challenge its inevitability and completeness, explore the repercussions of decolonization in Portugal, trace empire's lingering political impact in Brazil, or challenge the appropriateness of the "Age of Revolution (s)" as an interpretive framework. These gaps, and the historiographical silence concerning these absences, are curious and provocative. After all, Brazil's independence was a rather anti-climactic coda to a sixty-year, strenuous, Crown-directed effort to reform, revive, and reconfi gure the Portuguese empire, a non sequitur after approximately three hundred years of unceasing interaction -bonds forged in the crucible of maritime discovery, conquest, settlement, slavery, war, and commercebetween Portugal and the continents bordering and archipelagos dotting the Atlantic Ocean. It would be astounding if a political edifi ce buttressed by culture, religion, coercive power, capital, and personnel collapsed vertiginously, its debris vanished without leaving a trace, and its centuries-old connections were eviscerated, all by the time formal declarations of independence were made, recognized, and enshrined in international law. But that impression is precisely the one that a reader 9781107018975int_p1-16.indd 1 9781107018975int_p1-16.indd 1